Photography, Text and Their Relationship to Reality in the Early Thought of Roland Barthes

This bachelor thesis aims to compare conceptions of photography, text and their relationships to reality in the semiological texts of Roland Barthes from '60s. From his then structuralist position is photography "a message without a code" which is in direct, analogical relationship with reality, while text cannot be anything like that and is only capable of creating "the reality effect" or "referential illusion." Barthes places the photography to a specific place, which is unanalyzable with his semiological method - there is no system, code, only analogy of reality. Oppositely, it seems that in language, which is the standard of systematicity, through the arbitrary signs, one can never come to anything real. Even realistic literature produces only signs of realism, specific type of discourse, not signs of reality. Photography is the analogon of reality, while the speech always stays in discrepancy. The aim of this thesis is to show connectedness of the concept "reality effect" with Barthes' ways of thinking about photography, realistic texts try to constitute essentially similar way of signifying as photography, but for its language character produce only effect of reality. Another aim is to show the importance of the phenomenon of photography for Barthes' thought and to suggest that his research..