Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
HILL & WANG (2010), Edition: 1, 144 pages
Description
A graceful, contemplative volume, Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on the subject, along with Susan Sontags On Photography.
User reviews
LibraryThing member RajivC
Personally, I found this book to be of uneven quality. It has flashes where it is very good indeed, and then there are sections where I thought that he was meandering.
It is not an easy book, and I did read it slowly. I may well read it again. The overall tone is sombre, and the parts that I like
I am not sure about that section on his mother, but the pain of her loss, and his love for her shine through. This part is deeply personal, and I must admire him for being able to share this.
It is not an easy book, and I did read it slowly. I may well read it again. The overall tone is sombre, and the parts that I like
Show More
are when he discusses a photograph, because this made me a lot more sensitive to what is in the photo, and what the story could possibly be. This is the singular most achievement of this set of writings.I am not sure about that section on his mother, but the pain of her loss, and his love for her shine through. This part is deeply personal, and I must admire him for being able to share this.
Show Less
LibraryThing member eilonwy_anne
I would have to reread this book several times to retain much of it; as it was, I merely enjoyed it as a philosophical journey, an intellectual inquiry on which I was allowed to spy. It was fascinating, often revealing truths about my own relationship to photographs, while raising further questions
Show More
about photography, depiction, and art. Show Less
LibraryThing member dawnpen
..The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive..(p 6)
LibraryThing member knutskjaerven
This is probably the best, and most inspiring book on photography ever written. Inspirations for Barthes are both phenomenology and semiology.
LibraryThing member DawsonP
i love this book as this is the only philosophical writing i have ever come acros in the subject of photographic art work.this unveils the hidden layers of text in the form of written by light, is a unique experience of graphic decoding.
LibraryThing member g0ldenboy
It's a convoluted, superfluous mess. My professor even admitted it should be called "What Turns Me On" by Roland Barthes for its subjective indulgence and nutty pluralism. Read in less than a day.
LibraryThing member Acia
Based on 48 fragments of philosophical insights about photography, this short book is at its core about love and grief, written after the loss of Barthes’ mother in 1977 with whom he had lived most of his life. He starts looking for her among old photographs and time and again the face he finds
Show More
is not hers, even if she looks like herself. He ends up discovering her true likeness, the "air" that he remembers, in a picture of his mother at five years old taken by a provincial photographer in a winter garden in 1898. Show Less
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1980
Physical description
144 p.; 8.12 inches
ISBN
0374532338 / 9780374532338