The Relation of Historiography and the Problem of Referent in Photography in Roland Barthes

Abstract

It seems that objective historiography and the question of the real referent in photography do not have a clear relation, as can be seen in most of the contemporary essays on the relation between history and photography which are based on new definitions of representational capacity of photography and have no attention to past currents of historiography although all of them, in criticizing the photographic representation refer to works of Roland Barthes and his contemporaries, as the classical texts on photography. But a point that has been almost ignored is that Barthes' attention to the problem of the referent in photography goes beyond mere structuralism. His works on these two seemingly distinct areas namely history and photography show that his critical attitude toward the tradition of objective historiography, through all his intellectual life, from structuralism to poststructuralism, has been present in different areas including photography. What Barthes looks for by analyzing the problem of referent in photography is indeed the problem of objective historiography and its relation to reality, which he believes is not representable. Doubting the possibility of objectivity in historiography, Barthes challenges within semiotic framework the notion of ”photo is equal with reality” and therefore criticizes the realistic approach in history and photography.

Keywords

• historiography
• myth
• referent
• photography
• roland barthes