Miramentos: photography and the destiny of images

Abstract

The present text starts with a reading of the subjective dimension in Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes, stimulated by analyses of pictures made by Javier Marías in Miramientos, a black and white photographic album with pictures of writers and philosophers from a number of nationalities, and which ends with five portraits of the photographer himself in a chapter titled “Autoretrato farsante” (“Mock Self-portrait”). Such a look over oneself is questioned, in the specific case of Barthes, by the re-vision of his semiotic approach recently carried out by Jacques Rancière in Le destin des images.