Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The true total photograph accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality "that-has-been" with truth "there-she-is!"; It becomes at once evidential and exclamative; It bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire is a guarantee of Being. x

The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination on the one hand, "it is not there," on the other "but it has indeed been": a mad image, chafed by reality. x

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida