Camera Lucida bookcover

Camera Lucida

Reflections on Photography

Roland Barthes 

(Author)

Richard Howard 

(Translator)
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Description

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

PublisherHill and Wang
Publish DateOctober 12, 2010
Pages144
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9780374532338
Dimensions209.6 X 5.4 X 8.9 mm | 0.3 pounds
BISAC Categories: Arts & Hobbies, Philosophy

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.

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

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