In front of the camera, unless one is a complete natural in the spotlight, he or she changes. It’s normal for people to pose in front of the lens. I tend to smile, make a funny face, or just glare at the camera. A photograph captures a moment in time, and no photograph is exactly like another because time is constantly flowing. We’re constantly changing too. We’re never the same as we were when the photograph was taken.

Roland Barthes compares us, the referents (what the photograph represents), to the image of ourselves we see on film. He believes it is in a photograph we transform ourselves into objects and take on a false identity. I don’t quite agree because the photograph could reflect us, as we are in the present, or the “us” we hope to become. The “faces” we put on in front of the camera are still a part of who we are. Because people are multi-dimensional, it would be impossible for one photograph to capture someone’s true nature. 

Barthes suggests the existence of death in every photograph. “However ‘lifelike’ we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead” (31-32). I don’t really understand how a photograph can be unreal or not lifelike. The subject is real, the referent is real, and the face that the subject puts in front of the camera is real in that moment.

Although I had a difficult time trying to understand all that Barthes was saying, his ideas are pretty extraordinary. He helps the reader to look at photographs from his point- of –view by walking us through his reasoning. I never would have seen the relationship between death and a photograph if not for him. He definitely helps his readers step outside the box. 

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