Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [Paperback]
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.
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Community Reviews
(3.5) Groundbreaking analysis of photography’s effect on the viewer. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of studium and punctum—the intellectual and the shocking—but I felt that the exploration of photography as art, and what it means for a photograph to be considered art, was severely lacking. Barthes briefly touches on this in one short chapter toward the end, but he inadvertently weakens the photograph’s status by failing to fully distinguish or define it's interaction or existence as art.
