Consequently he makes a mistake of taking the authenticating capacity of the text for that of the photography. Barthes gives a photograph the excessive power of authentication. A photograph does not authenticate the abstract, general space and time, but the very concrete, specific space and time such as universal time, exposure time, referent speed. But his argument is limited in that what he meant by the contents of the photographic authentication is not concrete but abstract.

Second, Barthes's arguments that the specificity of photography is that of the referent, and that photography has the power of authenticating the existence of the referent are very appropriate. Thus we have to stick to the dualistic approach considering the referent and the operator at the same time when interpreting a photograph, instead of having the monistic approach considering only the referent in the photograph. However, in all photographs, remain the traces of the photographed and of the operator. First, Barthes sees only the referent in a photograph, and forgets the operator(photographer and camera) faced with the referent. From this photographic specificity Barthes infer ‘that-has-been’, which is, he thinks, the essence of photography. The specificity of the photography by which Barthes means in the book is that of the photographic referent. It is, in a word, ‘what is photography?’, finally the ontology of the photography. Barthes's real concern in this book is not ‘punctum’ but the specificity of photography, which is the fundamental properties of the photography as distinguished from those of language or other images.

By doing so, I aim to make a contribution to the discussion on the ontology of photography and suggest a method by which to interpret photography more appropriately. This paper attempts to make a critical analyse of Roland Barthes's idea of photographic specificity, which is the central subject of his Camera Lucida.

Camera obscura barthes