"Mortiferous" means deadly. For Barthes, the mechanical, very real sound of the camera shutter clicking breaks through the fakeness and death-anticipation of being photographed.

The "eye" of the photographer, or the lens of the camera, "terrifies" Barthes because they are the things over which he has no control; they will determine the look of his portrait photograph and influence the way others interpret it.

The shutter of the camera, and the click sound that it makes, however, are solid, material, predictable, and therefore comforting things.

The "ethos" of a culture is a set of core beliefs and ideals that guide its members' feelings toward life; while the "eidos" is the intellectual approach taken toward examining it.

When Barthes says that "Death is the eidos of the camera," he is saying that the purpose of a portrait photograph is the "death" of its subject, in the sense that it captures the image of a thing that will eventually die, and preserves it by rendering it still and lifeless.

A subject has a voice and a degree of control; an object does not. Barthes believes it is a poltitical act to try to prevent oneself from becoming an object, or being objectified, by a photograph.

Think about how this applies to the facial recognition technology in wide use today.

When something is "internalized," it is so very much a part of you that you are almost unaware of it. To "disinternalize" something is to take that interior, private state and make it exterior and public, so that it loses its deep connection to you, and to its private meaning.

He was mourning the death of his mother.

He is talking about what happens to photographs; how they are used and interpreted, or discarded and forgotten, independently of the will of the people in them.

When he looks at a photograph of himself, he sees a ghost of himself because he doesn't recognize his own spirit within it. He also imagines others looking at it after his death.

Barthes is saying that he has no control over what others will think of the photograph of him, what they will think of him, or what conclusions they will draw about him based upon it. He also recognizes that he has no control over its duplication or use.

Barthes believes the portrait photographer's greatest fear is failing to make the subject look truly alive. For him, this is irony, because he sees the photograph as a form of death.

Barthes goes on to note the list of fake scenes to be captured in photos that will be perceived as reality.

This is a reference to the writing of Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), after whom the term "sadism" was named, who was famous for his sexual exploits.

Sade wrote about French houses of prostitution, in front of which prostitutes were sometimes stationed to handle the advancing men. He likened these women to "plastrons," which is the French word for an armored breastplate that protects the torso against projectiles.

Barthes thinks of himself posing for the lens as creating a "plastron" for the camera: A solid piece of armor, passively placed, to protect what is within. He likens the act of being photographed to an act of prostitution, in the way that both elicit a sort of passive guardedness against a consensual violation.

"Barthes loves paradox, and becoming four things at once (five if you count dead) makes his compulsive posing of the greatest interest to him. Portrait photography itself (the entire subject of Barthes’s book) is always a paradox. He looks at a very old picture of two young girls and has the vertiginous realization that 'They have their whole lives before them; but also they are dead (today), they are then already dead (yesterday).' Therefore, 'each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death.'" https://slowreads.com/2011/07/13/death-and-photography/

The moment of shooting a photo is a meaningful split second of time, during which a person is transformed into an object.

Pretending to be someone else in order to deceive others.

Posing for a photograph feels like being fake.

Think about the fact that a photograph is an image of you over which you have no control, and whose interpretation may be very far from your image of yourself.

"A set of images fuctioning as a misunderstanding of the subject." https://books.google.com/books?id=CJO-kUld-24C&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=image-repertoire+meaning&source=bl&ots=yDRLSFvoSh&sig=ACfU3U3pqKzvj7mpEJRIzWrLj4YDpcivdw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwingOndtITrAhWhna0KHW-5DU4Q6AEwBXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=image-repertoire%20meaning&f=false

Barthes uses language poetically; his statements are layered with symbolic meaning.

He explains that portrait photographers of the 1800s used a device to help people hold still for the long exposure of the photograph. It involved a headrest, which being behind the head, was invisible to the camera.

Metaphorically, Barthes stands upon this antique headrest now as if it were a pedestal, and he makes himself into a statue on it as he poses for a photograph.

This turning of himself into a statue confines and immobilizes him, in a sense, like a corset would.

While photos today are usually taken in a spit second, the first photographs required extremely long exposure times. The earliest photos - daguerreotypes - took 15 minutes to expose, so they were totally impractical for photographing people.

Early forms of portrait photography required people to sit perfectly still without blinking in bright sunlight for about 15 seconds, which is longer than it sounds. https://dp.la/exhibitions/evolution-personal-camera/early-photography

If you allow someone to take your photo, then you are the subject of the photo. The photo itself, however, is an object.

This statement can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically.

Literally, if you want to take a photograph of a landscape on property that is owned by someone else, you have to get their permission to be there, and to take and use the photo. The owner is "lending" you their lanscape.

Metaphorically, "landscape" can mean any subject of any photograph. The subject of the photo is generally another person, or something owned by another person.

Who owns your body? Who owns the image of it? Doesn't a photograph of you impart a kind of ownership over you, or your image, to the individual who possesses it?

He is talking about the discomfort one feels in seeing oneself anywhere aside from a mirror. He refers to the phenomenon of "doubles," or thinking you've seen yourself from a distance, which was a theme in European literature.

Barthes says there is "profound madness" in photography because it allows you to see a double of yourself. Before the invention of photographic technology, it would have been "madness" - crazy - to think that you saw yourself anywhere but in a mirror, or possibly reflected off a body of water.

"A mental disorder the symptom of which is hallucinations, commonly associated with the ingestion of alcohol or other drugs." https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hallucinosis#:~:text=%2F%20(h%C9%99%CB%8Clu%CB%90s%C9%AA%CB%88n%C9%99%CA%8As%C9%AAs)%20%2F-,noun,of%20alcohol%20or%20other%20drugs

"Heautoscopy is a term used in psychiatry and neurology for the reduplicative hallucination of seeing one's own body at a distance. It can occur as a symptom in schizophrenia and epilepsy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoscopy#:~:text=Heautoscopy%20is%20a%20term%20used,possible%20explanation%20for%20doppelg%C3%A4nger%20phenomena.

A photograph captures a version of you that feels alien to you as soon as you see it. Further, It goes out into the world to represent you, without your awareness.

Barthes wants us to consider the history of the image, and how changing technology has "disrupted," or at least transformed, society.

Prior to the invention of photography, the only way a person could ever see an image of themselves, aside from in a mirror, was by having a portrait painted. It was expensive, but an artist could make you look more attractive than perhaps you were in person.

To Barthes, a snapshot looks a lot like a "mugshot" - the official photograph of a person under arrest.

In the days of film, as opposed to digital, photography, a photomat was a store you took your film to, to have printed photos made.

For context: This book is, in part, a meditation on his mother's death.

A photograph captures a split second, and a momentary facial expression is fixed for all time, regardless of what it meant, or whether it meant anything at all.

A photograph is a moment in time, fixed in place forever, while a person is continually in motion and changing.

The photo feels unrelated to how he sees himself.

Again, Barthes wants a photo to represent his image of himself.

A material representation of a person, like a sculpture or a painting.

To bring the argument back around to its beginning premise.

Ironically, he is consciously composing a fake image in order to make the result represent him more truly.

Barthes doesn't know how to make his body create an image for the camera that he feels really represents who he is.

A bad photo can make you look really bad, and it takes a skilled photographer to shoot a really good portrait photo.

He wants the photograph to capture his essence, or his spirit, the way a painting might, rather than an exactly faithful copy of however superficially good or bad he might look that day.

Barthes wishes that a photo was as easy to control as a painting is, in terms of how good it makes the person look. Bear in mind that he lived before the time of Instagram, Photoshop, and digital photo filters. Someone took a photo of you on film, which neither one of you could see until the film was developed and printed, and that took time and money.

Unlikeable.

Google definition:"the manner in which a thing is related to another from which it is derived or descended in some respect." A family relationship.

In other words, Barthes is uncertain of his relationshp to a photograph of himself. Is his body the creator and master of the image, or does he unconsciously pose his body for the creation of an image, or does the image create his body for whoever looks at it?

Barthes passed away in 1980, but looking at a photo of him on Google, always with a cigarette or cigar dangling in his mouth, brings him to life for us, in a way.

Barthes is admitting that photos don't endanger him, the way they did the Communards.

In 1871, the French were defeated and occupied by the German kingdom of Prussia. The people of Paris fought back by establishing a socialist commune in the middle of Paris; the rebels posed proudly for photos on the barricades they built. Their resistance was brutally put down by the Prussians, who killed tens of thousands of people. Barthes refers here to the fact that photos were used to identify and track down the rebels. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communards

Google definition: deadly.

Google definition: "a sudden and unaccountable change of mood or behavior."

A photograph "creates" your body because firstly, you pose for it, and secondly, it represents that body when people look at it later on.

Barthes goes on to explain in the next sentence that a photograph can be deadly, too.

When someone points a camera at you, you turn yourself into a superficial version of yourself for the lens to capture, don't you?

Think about how you react to a camera pointed at you. Don't you immediately think about how you look? Do you immediately pose? Or run away?

Despite the popularity of selfies and Instagram, many people still dislike being photographed.

1915 - 1980, a French philosopher whose thinking had an influence on late 20th century anthropology.

Barthes set out to write a book that was based exclusively on his own personal experiences, rather than what he had read or heard about.

The title is a play on words, because a photograph is a reflection of an object.