On July 1, 2020 we met to discuss Roland Barthes’s 1980 Camera Lucida, a true classic photo text. One of the main points that emerged from the discussion was how Barthes utilizes the phrase “second sight.” We collectively arrived at a position that second sight is the thing that happens with photographs despite the photographer’s (or “Operator’s”) best intentions: it is the unconscious second seeing done by the camera that the photographer was not able to, or did not think of to control. Second sight is tethered to the intentional framing by the photographer, and its quality and potential for vastness therefore depends on the skill of the photographer. Second sight is the raw medium from which emerges the prick, the sting, or the famously coined “punctum,” which for Barthes is what makes an image adventuresome, or emotionally engaging. One must know that the photographer did not intend to create puncta that come out of the second sight.
We drew parallels with Elizabeth Edwards’s concepts of “excess,” “presence,” and “abundance,” found in her account of using historical ethnographic photographs in present-day anthropological research.
Photograph by Charles Clifford, “The Alhambra (Grenada)”, 1854-56. Barthes uses this image in chapter 16 of his book to help define “landscapes of predilection.” I am reminded, too, of Washington Irving’s 1832 “Tales of the Alhambra.”
Here is Barthes quoted at length regarding his relationship with landscape photographs, one of the places in the text where he conjures second sight and landscapes of predilection.
For me, photographs of landscape (urban or country) must be habitable, not visitable. This longing to inhabit, if I observe it clearly in myself, is neither oneiric (I do not dream of some extravagant site) nor empirical (I do not intend to buy a house according to the views of a real-estate agency); it is fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself …. Looking at these landscapes of predilection, it is as if I were certain of having been there or of going there (pp. 39-40).