ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the theme of trauma and media is developed in several essays by Roland Barthes. I propose that Barthes’s writings on photography register the historical traumas of both colonial and revolutionary violence. In his critique of ideologies purveyed by mass media, Barthes looked for different ways that the photograph carries traces of historical reality. Several critics have seen Barthes’s structural analysis of the image as inadequate to confronting the political crises of his era whereas I argue that Barthes presents an important account of the ways that the photograph is situated with respect to individual and collective identity and the modern experience of violence and death. In short, I see Barthes’s refl ections on the structures of photographic meaning as incorporating a sustained meditation on historical trauma.
