ABSTRACT
The irruption of a new way of seeing into the field of the presently accepted, loosely conglomerated canons and codes produces an ec-
stasy and a m adness that threaten to destroy familiar conceptions of physical objects, o f temporal continuity, and of personal identity. Inscribed in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida are notions of a genetic identity as sprawling as the ancestral tree whose lines it draws and a specular identity as short-lived as the click of the camera. Single
branches of the tree of life are continuous in time but severally
simultaneous; the cam era’s click lasts a moment, but what the camera captures and prints lasts as long as metal plate and paper last. Tem poral and conceptual boundaries of the subject self and the
physical object split and shift: they go wild. What Camera Lucida goes wild about is the photograph, and what it says about the photograph ’s wildness is that it may be tamed, in one of two ways: by being m ade into art, or by being m ade banal, generalised, made familiar and everyday. But it need not be tamed, and when it is not, the spectator who sees the wildness dissolves into the photograph she is viewing, as the writerly reader dissolves into the text she reads in what Barthes calls an ecstasy. Look first at the dissolve of the difference
between perceived and photographed objects, and then at the ways of taming the m adness of the photograph.
