Roland Barthes’s Ghosts: Photobiographical Influence and Legacies

Abstract

Roland Barthes published a number of texts on photography from the 1950s onwards. In Mythologies (published between 1954 and 1956),¹ ‘Le Message photographique’ (‘The Photographic Message’, 1961), ‘Rhétorique de l’image’ (Rhetoric of the Image’, 1964) and ‘Le Troisième Sens’ (‘The Third Meaning’, 1970), his approach is largely semiological and sociological.² In Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes), which opens with a short album of family snapshots, and above all in La Chambre claire (Camera Lucida), an essay on photography whose publication triggered a surge of interest in photography in France and elsewhere, his approach is more personal. These two books (the first published in 1975 and the second in 1980, the year of Barthes’s death) initiated what Antoine Compagnon has called ‘une mode contemporaine du récit de vie avec photos’ (‘a contemporary vogue for life writing using photographs’).³ In this respect, Barthes can be viewed as a second trailblazer of the ‘photobiographical’ genre after André Breton, whose seminal phototexts Nadja and L’Amour fou (‘Mad Love’) appeared in 1928 and 1937 respectively. The term ‘photobiographie’ (‘photobiography’) was used for the first time in French by Gilles Mora and Claude Nori in their L’Été dernier: manifeste photobiographique (Last Summer: Photobiographical Manifesto, 1983).