Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.
Camera Lucida provides a moving and insightful tribute to the author's mother. However, to my mind, the thinking about photography is rather less valuable. Barthes begins by announcing that the subject compels him to dispense with the compulsion to theorizing that seems endemic to French academic writing. A promising and welcome beginning.
Camera Lucida, along with Susan Sontag 's On Photography, was one of the most important early academic books of criticism and theorization on photography. Neither writer was a photographer, however, and both works have been much criticised since the 1990s. Nevertheless, it was by no means Barthes' earliest approach to the subject.
The Theatricality of the Punctum: Re-Viewing Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. Harry Robert Wilson, University of Glasgow Introduction—Roland Barthes and I Thus it would be wrong to say that if we undertake to reread the text we do so for some intellectual advantage (to understand better, to analyze on good grounds): it is actually and invariably for a ludic advantage: to multiply the.
MYTHOLOGIES MYTHOLOGIES Books by Roland Barthes A Barthes Reader Camera Lucida Critical Essays The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies Elements of Semiology The Empire of Signs The Fashion System The Grain of the Voice Image-Music-Text A Lover's Discourse Michelet Mythologies New Critical Essays On Racine The Pleasure of the Text.
His last major work, Camera Lucida, is partly an essay about the nature of photography and partly a meditation on photographs of his mother. The book contains many reproductions of photographs, though none of them are of Henriette.
Upon closer exanimation of Walter Benjamin’s essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Little History of Photography, and comparison to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, it is clear that stating Benjamin was simply against technology and mechanical reproduction is a reductive understanding of his texts. Benjamin’s concept of aura was much more extensive and elaborate.
Camera lucida, (Latin: “light chamber”), optical instrument patented in 1806 by William Hyde Wollaston to facilitate accurate sketching of objects. It consists of a four-sided prism mounted on a small stand above a sheet of paper. By placing the eye close to the upper edge of the prism so that half the pupil of the eye is over the prism, the observer is able to see a reflected image of an.