Michael Coldwell - This Will Be No Longer There (2016)
“Death as eidos of the photograph then begins to take on a particularly interesting character as Barthes relates it to temporality, the temporal paradox of the photograph which he first describes as “a perverse confusion” of the Real and the Live: “by attesting that the object has been real [the certification of past-presence], the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive [a delusion of present-presence], because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (“this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already dead” (CL 79). Barthes later reformulates this temporal character of the photograph as the simultaneous experience/perception in reading of the “this will be” and the “this has been.” This temporal paradox is the strange, almost hallucinatory, experience of the future anterior “of which death is the stake.””
Lori Wike, Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida, 2000 InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture