"'Camera Lucida' is a small book on how photographs look and what they reveal. Barthes wrote the book in two months after the death of his mother and articulated several his ideas around the effect of photographs. It is written in two parts, the first is more scholarly and outlines his essential thesis to how we read and experience photographs. He defines two terms 'studium' (the elements of an image that draw us in) and 'punctum' (the unexpected and unexplainable prick or sting to an image that affect us). The second part of the book is a beautiful meditation on mourning, remembrance and grief. Barthes goes ‘looking’ for his mother in old photographs and discovers an image of his mother and her brother as a child in a glass conservatory or winter garden and the photograph achieves for Barthes the impossible science of the unique being (what a great line). Barthes does not show the Winter Garden Photograph in the book as it only has meaning for him, to everyone else it is part of the infinite wash of images that we witness daily."

"My sister Donna Philp nee Smith lost her right leg to cancer when she 14. After a long course of chemotherapy, she started competing in field events in disabled sport. By the time she passed away at 33 in 1999 she had represented Australia at three Paralympics and several other international competitions which is where she would take her photographs. While training for the 2000 Sydney Paralympics she had a heart attack and passed away days later."

"Mum and Dad worked so my sister and I were often home by ourselves. For the most part we got along very well but I could also be a pain in the arse. On a particular occasion during school holidays we were playing matchbox football on our laminate coffee table (a game played with a matchbox where you flick it trying to get it to stop while overhanging the end of the coffee table) and I was winning and gloating. My sister in frustration picked up the coffee table (it was laminate) and threw it at me. The end of the table hit me in mouth causing a lot of blood to spill. Panic ensues. I’m told to not tell Mum and I didn’t, what gave it away was the massive gash above my lip that required three stitches and the dried blood around my mouth."

"Barthes’ writing on several topics casts a long shadow but within photography his legacy is still relevant. He is usually their first reference when writing about photography’s reception and reach. It is like a generation of young photographers who wish to shoot Robert Frank’s 'The Americans' or their regional equivalent. For many years I went to folio reviews, and you would strike a conversation with the person next you between the interviews, without fail there was at least one person wanting to show their version of 'The Americans'. The desire to replicate or respond to your influences is strong and Barthes’ personal essay on the effect of photographs still resonates."

"The photographs she took while travelling were very typical images of tourist destinations, hotels, and my personal favourite, a human standing in front of a significant large thing. The photograph that I became most interested in was an image she took while waiting to compete. The exact time, date and place I am unsure of. The frame is simply a POV image of her legs from just above the knees, the rest of the frame is her shoes and the clay-coloured athletic track. There is absolutely nothing exceptional about it except the legs are different. One leg is organic and the other synthetic, one leg is the colour of flesh and the other is coloured like flesh, one shoe is worn like it has feet in it and the other shoe is like new, one knee shows age the other knee doesn’t exist. The photograph is of something very familiar to my sister, her body with the artificial appendage, but to an anonymous viewer it represents a significant difference. This photograph resonated with me because it reveals more than what her legs looked like, by documenting, archiving, and preserving her difference. I read it as acceptance of her disability and the life she was able to pursue after it."

"One month after the publication of 'Camera Lucida' Barthes was walking home after a lunch with, future (in Barthes time)/former (in our time), French President François Mitterand he was struck by a laundry van and passed away, from complications of the accident, one month later. The spring of 1980 saw the death of two leading French thinkers, Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre. While Barthes funeral in Urt was attended by a few loyal friends, Sartre’s funeral in Montparnasse was attended by over fifty thousand people. Barthes last text, an essay on Stendhal, was left on his desk the day of the accident was titled 'One Always Fails to Speak of the Things One Loves'."

"High school confirmed my acceptance of being average and since then my reign as the statistical mean of a man began. I went to an all-boys catholic school in the 80’s so we didn’t have art or any languages as a subject, just film and television and the only thing that I was sufficient at was photography. Everything else, I did at school, was a chore. It was taught for one term in grade 10 by a man who loved the medium but hated teaching, he especially hated boys aged around grade 10. For whatever reason, the process of taking photographs was something I understood and enjoyed. When Mr Kubiak explained the exposure triangle, I understood it. When Mr Kubiak described how to read light and expose for it, it made sense, when Mr Kubiak demonstrated how we process and print images, I felt relief that there was finally a thing that made me feel connected to…I wasn’t sure what, but I was engaged.

Mr Kubiak was unable to pass this interest onto many of my fellow students and photography was cancelled at the school the next year. They were selling all of the cameras and I asked my parents to buy me one of the Pentax K1000’s. I got the camera on the same day we went to the beach and as soon as we got there I ran down to the shore, made sure the needle was in the middle, the circles were connected and took a photo of the horizon, then I turned left and took a photo of the beach and the ocean, I turned around and took a photo of the walkway, I turned right but thought it was the same as if I turned left so didn’t bother. I finished the roll got it developed and the results were not good. I didn’t use the camera again for a while."

"Roland Barthes’ 'Camera Lucida'[1] is to photography students[2] what unresolved childhood dread[3] is to latchkey siblings[4], it’s tedious to everyone else[5] you can’t run from it fast enough[6], and eventually one of you will be hit by a laundry van[7]."

"Mathematics and I have never been close. Recognising our growing indifference towards each other I thought it might be good to learn more about their them, what makes them tick and how we can bridge the gap. I started by reading Roger Cooke’s The History of Mathematics – A Brief Course and on page two, paragraph one, it states, “For example, it is known that there is no finite algebraic formula involving only arithmetic operations and root extractions that will yield a root of every quintic equation when the coefficients of that equation are substituted for its variables.” Fuck you, Mathematics.

The first strain in the relationship, between Math and I, started early. In grade two I was taught by a Mercy Nun, called Sister Doyle whose teaching pedagogy was based around humiliation and her only source of creative thinking was manipulating the traditional function of objects to inflict pain. Sister Doyle wouldn’t just look at a whistle as a device for calling attention, she would recognise the strap that held it around her neck as a tool for whipping legs. A ruler was not just for making straight lines, when turned on its side and slapped against the knuckles of six-year-old children it caused pain, fear and anxiety. On a particular day in May, Sister Doyle was trying to teach us how to write the number 9. Her method was to run the top of the number over the line then bring it back. Under her tutelage we had to write the number 9 many, many, times as she came around the class making sure we ‘ran it along the line’, slapping the knuckles of anyone who didn’t meet her standards with the side of a ruler. She then chose several students, including me, to get up in front of class and show how they couldn’t do it right, slapping our hands with the ruler whenever we didn’t do it properly."

"Besides using the graphic reproduction of numbers as a torture prompt Sister Doyle’s other love was telling and retelling of the apparitions at Fatima. As anybody who had a catholic education before the banning of corporal punishment would know, the story of Fatima revolves around three young Portuguese shepherds, seven consecutive months meeting on the thirteenth of each month in the same spot to speak to an angel, who then hooked them up with the Virgin Mary and seventy thousand Catholics witnessing the sun careen towards the earth, then do a dance and go back to its original spot. Sister Doyle would show us a library book that included a photograph, taken in 1917, of the three young Portuguese shepherds, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto. They are dressed traditionally against the stone wall of a barn with the sternest of stern expressions. As Roland Barthes writes when he sees a photograph of Napoleon’s brother Jerome, “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor”, when you see the image of the three young Portuguese shepherds, “I am looking at eyes that have seen the Virgin Mary and ears that heard an angel say “What are you doing?” The photograph relegates the appearance and proclamations of the Holy Mother to an ordinary, objective and detached image of the three young Portuguese shepherds standing in front of a barn. It’s a photograph that simultaneously shows the divine and the irrelevant. It is like, if a photograph of my brother, sister, and I on a beach holiday, standing in front of a change shed, wearing last year’s togs becomes a parable to guilt young Catholics to say the rosary daily so they can have everlasting life and avoid eternal damnation in the furnaces of hell and do their math homework."

"The closest I came to witnessing an apparition was in 1997 when I was unrealistically stoned, living in Glasgow, and a friend and I played 'OK Computer' by Radiohead for the first time. We both sat there listening…motionless…silent as any concept of time dissolved around us, we saw the future and asked it pertinent questions that encompassed all of humankind. The future was generous with its time but eventually got bored of our questions and asked us to leave, I thought it was tad aggressive. You can’t relive the first time you experience something, which is both frustrating and beautiful, but like the three young Portuguese shepherds my visit from the future had a call for action. The next day I went to Java Internet Café and paid £10.00 for an email address as the bloody future didn’t tell me about Hotmail, which was free. This event essentially started my relationship with the algorithmic realm and in the two decades since I, and the community of humans I share the earth with, have fertilised the algorithm with a dizzying array of nonsense. French philosopher Bernard Stiegler represents our relationship between the human condition and technology with the Greek word, Pharmakon meaning both poison and cure. While the development of digital technologies has had undoubted utilitarian benefits to our lives through developments in medicine and the open availability of knowledge, it has also imbedded us into a system that doesn’t recognise or understand our capacity for reflection, judgement, aesthetic sensibility or as Stiegler says, ‘spirit’. As we proceed in an orderly fashion towards a future where the formation of us as individuals is algorithmically directed, Steigler and others suggest using technology to create the communities and economies that provide ethical, moral, aesthetic and artistic value. Recognising that technology is not outside of ‘spirit’ but an essential part of it."

"The first few years after school were spent on the couch contemplating a career in the Armed Services, because the ads would come on in between overs in the cricket. Bored of being bored I applied for and got a job at a 1 hour mini-lab called Taigum Photos in Taigum. Patrons would drop off their films, do their groceries, buy their pills come back an hour later to relive events that occurred in the past in the present. Mostly it was documentation of normalcy such as holidays, birthdays, Christmas day and the everyday. People were often disappointed in the results. There was always a hope that the photograph would present to them a version of themselves that was different from the one they encountered in the mirror. They would say, “I’m not very photogenic” implying that the photo favours some over others.

The customers that bought in nudes of themselves were always happy. Patrons, when going through their photos were often initially embarrassed, knowing that an untested suburban kid had seen a photograph of them naked, then giggle when reliving the moment. For the naked people of Taigum the camera was able to reproduce not just a representation of themselves naked but a record of exuberance. The sheer joy of being naked in a private space is then made public through the camera. I learnt a lot from the naked people of Taigum. They taught me that the photographs reproduced in that lab were not so much reproductions of the public’s physical features but the record of experiences and feelings that are fleeting, ephemeral and temporal."

"The first few years after school were spent on the couch contemplating a career in the Armed Services, because the ads would come on in between overs in the cricket. Bored of being bored I applied for and got a job at a 1 hour mini-lab called Taigum Photos in Taigum. Patrons would drop off their films, do their groceries, buy their pills come back an hour later to relive events that occurred in the past in the present. Mostly it was documentation of normalcy such as holidays, birthdays, Christmas day and the everyday. People were often disappointed in the results. There was always a hope that the photograph would present to them a version of themselves that was different from the one they encountered in the mirror. They would say, “I’m not very photogenic” implying that the photo favours some over others.

The customers that bought in nudes of themselves were always happy. Patrons, when going through their photos were often initially embarrassed, knowing that an untested suburban kid had seen a photograph of them naked, then giggle when reliving the moment. For the naked people of Taigum the camera was able to reproduce not just a representation of themselves naked but a record of exuberance. The sheer joy of being naked in a private space is then made public through the camera. I learnt a lot from the naked people of Taigum. They taught me that the photographs reproduced in that lab were not so much reproductions of the public’s physical features but the record of experiences and feelings that are fleeting, ephemeral and temporal."

"The first few years after school were spent on the couch contemplating a career in the Armed Services, because the ads would come on in between overs in the cricket. Bored of being bored I applied for and got a job at a 1 hour mini-lab called Taigum Photos in Taigum. Patrons would drop off their films, do their groceries, buy their pills come back an hour later to relive events that occurred in the past in the present. Mostly it was documentation of normalcy such as holidays, birthdays, Christmas day and the everyday. People were often disappointed in the results. There was always a hope that the photograph would present to them a version of themselves that was different from the one they encountered in the mirror. They would say, “I’m not very photogenic” implying that the photo favours some over others.

The customers that bought in nudes of themselves were always happy. Patrons, when going through their photos were often initially embarrassed, knowing that an untested suburban kid had seen a photograph of them naked, then giggle when reliving the moment. For the naked people of Taigum the camera was able to reproduce not just a representation of themselves naked but a record of exuberance. The sheer joy of being naked in a private space is then made public through the camera. I learnt a lot from the naked people of Taigum. They taught me that the photographs reproduced in that lab were not so much reproductions of the public’s physical features but the record of experiences and feelings that are fleeting, ephemeral and temporal."