Today I talk about Camera Lucida and How It's Related to a Different Piece I'm Writing

Camera Lucida is a terrific small book by Roland Barthes. It’s an important book in the theory of photography. I love it.

It goes into what is a photograph. It is the only art medium in which that which was taken in the photograph was really there in real life as it was really — and there are things about this that are really trippy in that in looking at the photograph you are looking both at the object that is the photograph and what was there as the subject of the photograph. Barthes then ends up talking about his dead mother.

It’s a wonderful little book.

A book I have been working on, Afantasia, is based on the structure of Camera Lucida. I owe my friend a synopsis of it. Let’s give it a shot.

Afantasia (as I’ve been writing it) is a hybrid memoir-essay about desire, and selfhood, my experiences in sex clubs, BDSM, and other silliness, told through a relationship with my teacher Arya, that starts off as the method for the book and then as the book progresses becomes the subject.

The book starts from my inability to “picture” what I want sexually and calls this blankness “afantasia,” — the missing space where fantasy is supposed to be. From there, the book moves through a series of “firsts.” And then it kind of falls apart…

Camera Lucida also ends up contradicting itself in parts, takes on different moods. I did not intend my book to be any longer than Camera Lucida. In fact, it was an experiment in writing a very short book to completion.

But I still need something to happen…

Camera Lucida is an elegy. It was published shortly before his death. People are known often to talk about and think about their mothers before their deaths. In thinking about his mother, he was likely also thinking about his own mortality.

Is my book an elegy for something? A lost innocence? Am I secretly thinking about my father?

I do not know…but I need a central image that the book moves to, the way that Camera Lucida ends up with the image of the mother — the only image that is described, but not shown in the book.

There is a specific image that came to mind, when I talked through this book with a friend. He said that I do not have to have a whole plot in mind, it can just be a book of things that happen, and the same thing is shown in different ways.

There are places I don’t want to go, that I don’t think I’m ready to go. Like that in high school I thought that maybe if I had sex with a guy he wouldn’t kill himself, even though I didn’t even know him. Or that scene I saw when this woman’s husband was hospitalized, and I saw her give a massage naked to another man. I wondered about that, and concluded well what else the hell is she supposed to do.

And there’s a sadness there. I don’t know what it means though. The point of the book was how much the real culture around these orgiastic excesses ends up being tied up in these real sadnesses. There’s a different between porn and these underground scenes, because that’s the difference between fantasy and reality.