ABSTRACT
This chapter reassesses Barthes’ contribution to photography theory in the context of posthumous publications and unpublished archival material and evaluates the extent to which they shed a new or different light on some of his well-known arguments and ideas. Against the wider background of his strong opposition of photographic representation to language, this chapter demonstrates that a phenomenological, affective, and autobiographical approach to photography is characteristic of his entire engagement with the medium—interrupted by his semiotic-structuralist phase—rather than only a feature of his late work as has hitherto been assumed to be the case.
