Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

by Roland Barthes, Richard Howard (Translator)

Overview

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes's personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume—and the last book he published—finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography.

Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, 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 Sontag's On Photography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374532338
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/12/2010
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Roland Barthes changed the way a generation read. A cultural commentator before his time, his careful if playful analysis of texts revolutionised the way we comprehend cultural products. Both critic and literary essayist, his writings continue to provoke. His best known work includes Mythologies, Camera Lucida, Image-Music-Text, The Empire of Signs, A Lover's Discourse, Writing Degree Zero, S/Z and The Fashion System.

Translated by Andy Stafford, Senior Lecturer in French Studies, University of Leeds and edited by Andy Stafford and Michael Carter, Department of Art History and Theory, University of Sydney.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society.

Richard Howard teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, USA. He has also translated works by Barthes, Foucault and Todorov.

Editorial Reviews

[Barthes] has accomplished in this extraordinary book something finer than mere polemic. En route to his last painful discovery, Barthes takes the reader on an exquisitely rendered, lyrical journey into the heart of his own life and the medium he came to love, a medium that flirts constantly with the ‘intractable reality' of the human condition.” —Newsweek

From the Publisher

[Barthes] has accomplished in this extraordinary book something finer than mere polemic. En route to his last painful discovery, Barthes takes the reader on an exquisitely rendered, lyrical journey into the heart of his own life and the medium he came to love, a medium that flirts constantly with the 'intractable reality' of the human condition.

Newsweek

A considerable part of ''Camera Lucida'' is a semiotic dithyramb, if you can imagine such a thing, on the subject of Mr. Barthes's deceased mother....in ''Camera Lucida'' Mr. Barthes has photographed himself, in words, as ''thus and so,'' and has added to the serenity of the great Oriental sages an inexhaustible originality and a play of mind like the play of sunlight on a grand French boulevard. -- New York Times

Anatole Broyard