So much information is condensed and made inaccessible to the viewer. It is as if a sculpture, a three dimensional work, is photographed, reduced to two dimensions. The reader (viewer) comes to the text (image) empty handed with, initially, only their own knowledge and context. The complexity of different connotations and experiences that come from the author into the text are hidden when it arrives with the reader. The reader/viewer has more responsibility to the text than the author.

“A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.” (IMT p.148) īarthes proposes that all ‘messages’ are built within a social and political context and cannot claim to be a direct release from the author independent from these contexts. However, this is to deny the place of the work created – the text – as a thing in its own right with its own possible interpretations and meanings. The creator’s work is mistakenly seen as a direct passage to the creator him/herself. Here, Barthes is not talking about a literal author or the individual creator of a work, but about the idea that there is some transmission process from the creator of a message to the receiver of that message. Roland Barthes (1967) ‘Death of the Author’ in Barthes (1977) Image, Music, Text p.146) Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’ – victory to the critic.”

Quote 1: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.

It argues that the producer of the message (text or image) has only partial control over its meaning. ‘Death of the Author’ is a short essay in which Barthes expands on his ideas about how we respond to and interpret the messages we are sent through images and texts. This was the very last lecture of the year and for this lecture we discussed Roland Barthes’ later texts on authorship and his only book dedicated to photography alone, Camera Lucida.ĭuring this lecture we continued looking at the writings of Roland Barthes, whilst focusing on two key texts:

Roland barthes camera