Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (French: La Chambre claire) is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopherRoland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes' late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum").
In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.
Camera Lucida, which takes its name from the optical device the camera lucida, consists of 48 chapters divided into two parts. The book is composed in free form and does not follow a particularly rigid structure. Barthes does not present a fixed thesis, but instead, highlights the evolution of his thought process as the book unfolds. As such, he consistently returns to ideas expressed in previous chapters to complete them, or even deny them. The story becomes increasingly personal in the second half, as scientific terminology, precise vocabulary, and numerous scholarly and cultural references give way to increasingly subjective and intimate language. The book is illustrated by 25 photographs, old and contemporary, chosen by the author. Among them are the works of famous photographers such as William Klein, Robert Mapplethorpe and Nadar, in addition to a photograph from Barthes' private collection.
Context
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's earliest approach to the subject. Barthes mentions photography in one of his 'little mythologies'—articles published in the journal Les Lettres Nouvelles starting in 1954, and gathered in Mythologies, published in 1957 (and in English translation in 1972). The article "Photography and Electoral Appeal" is more obviously political than Camera Lucida.
In the 1960s and entering the next decade, Barthes's analysis of photography develops more detail and insight through a structuralist approach; the treatment of photography in Mythologies is by comparison tangential and simple. There is still in this structural phase a strong political impulse and background to his theorizing of photography; Barthes connects photography's ability to represent without style (a 'perfect analagon': "The Photographic Message", 1961) to its tendency to naturalise what are in fact invented and highly structured meanings. His examples deal with press photographs and advertising, which make good use of this property (or bad use of it, as the case may be).
Published two months prior to his death in 1980, Camera Lucida is Barthes's first and only book devoted to photography. By now his tactics in writing, always shifting and complex, favouring the dialectical to the morally or politically 'committed' (Sartre), had once again changed. If sentimentality can be seen as a tactic in the late career of Roland Barthes, then Camera Lucida belongs to such an approach. It is novelistic, in line with the developments towards this new type of writing which Barthes had shown with A Lover's Discourse and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. However, the ideas about photography in Camera Lucida are certainly prepared in essays like "The Photographic Message", "Rhetoric of the Image" (1964), and "The Third Meaning" (1971). There is a movement through these three pieces of which Camera Lucida can be seen as the culmination. With "The Third Meaning" there is the suggestion that the photograph's reality, aside from all the messages it can be loaded with, might constitute an avant-garde value: not a message as such, aimed at the viewer/reader, but another kind of meaning that arises almost accidentally yet without being simply 'the material' or 'the accidental'; this is the eponymous third meaning. This essay of 1970, ostensibly about some Eisenstein stills, anticipates many of Camera Lucida's ideas and connects them back to still earlier ones. One could almost swap the term third meaning for the punctum of Camera Lucida.
Yet the personal note of pain in Camera Lucida is not present in these earlier writings and is unmistakable. Written after his mother's death, Camera Lucida is as much a reflection on death as it is on photography. Barthes died after being struck by a laundry van soon after the publication of Camera Lucida, and many have read the book as Barthes' eulogy for himself.
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.
Mythologies is a 1957 book by Roland Barthes. It is a collection of essays first published from 1954 to 1956 in the French literary review Les Lettres nouvelles, examining the tendency of contemporary social value systems to create modern myths. Barthes also looks at the semiology of the process of myth creation, updating Ferdinand de Saussure's system of sign analysis by adding a second level where signs are elevated to the level of myth.
The Family of Man was an ambitious exhibition of 503 photographs from 68 countries curated by Edward Steichen, the director of the New York City Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) department of photography. According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the "culmination of his career". The title was taken from a line in a Carl Sandburg poem.
Jane Anne Gallop is an American professor who since 1992 has served as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she has taught since 1990.
The history of photography began with the discovery of two critical principles: The first is camera obscura image projection, the second is the discovery that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light. There are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.
Fine-art photography is photography created in line with the vision of the photographer as artist, using photography as a medium for creative expression. The goal of fine-art photography is to express an idea, a message, or an emotion. This stands in contrast to representational photography, such as photojournalism, which provides a documentary visual account of specific subjects and events, literally representing objective reality rather than the subjective intent of the photographer; and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services.
Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life. It is typically undertaken as professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit.
Dick Blau is a professor of film at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, a photographer and film maker, and a figure in the study of photography of the family
Punctum, plural puncta, adjective punctate, is an anatomical term for a sharp point or tip. It may also refer to:
Kathy Vargas is an American artist who creates photographs from multiple exposures that she hand colors. She often devotes several works to a particular theme, creating series.
Truth claim, in photography, is a term Tom Gunning uses to describe the prevalent belief that traditional photographs accurately depict reality. He states that the truth claim relies on both the indexicality and visual accuracy of photographs.
Photobiography is a "person's biography as revealed through photographs". This is a neologism that was used for the first time in the French language in Manifeste photobiographique (1983), written by Gilles Mora and co-written with Claude Nori.
Provoke, with its subtitle of Provocative Materials for Thought, was an experimental, small-press Japanese photography magazine founded in 1968 by critic/photographers Kōji Taki and Takuma Nakahira, photographer Yutaka Takanashi, and writer Takahiko Okada. Daidō Moriyama joined from the second issue. Provoke was "a platform for a new photographic expression", "to free photography from subservience to the language of words", "that stood in opposition to the photography establishment". It was a quarterly magazine that also included poetry, criticism and photographic theory. Provoke lasted for only three issues but has been described as having a "profound effect upon Japanese photography in the 1970s and 80s", and is said to have "spread a completely new idea of photography in Japan".
Carol Jane Mavor is an American writer and professor. Her work includes the books Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, and Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour. She is Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester.
Odette England is an Australian-British photographer whose artwork has been exhibited internationally. She often uses family photographs in her practice.
TEN.8 was a British photography magazine founded in 1979 and published quarterly in Birmingham, England, throughout the 1980s, folding in 1992.
Joseph Chila is a Cameroonian photographer from Mbouda in the West Region of Cameroon. For most of his working life he was based in Mayo-Darlé in Adamawa Region.
La Recherche photographique: histoire-esthétique was a specialised peer-reviewed bi-annual French journal, published from September 1986 to spring 1997, and edited by Paris Audiovisuel and the University of Paris 8.
Les Cahiers de la photographie, published between 1981 and 1994 was a French magazine devoted to photography with the goal of promoting criticism of contemporary photography.
Photography and non-logical form is a book and research concept by art critic and art historian Ekaterina Vasilyeva. The book provides an idea that draws attention to the irrational basis of photography. The study considers photography as a tool that reveals the irrational and archaic principle of thinking. Considered one of the formative books in the field of photography theory. The book is created as a collection of essays published in the 2010s in academic sources. The texts touch on aspects of a single topic and raise the general problem of the phenomenon of the non-logical in photography. It was published as a separate book by New Literary Review in 2019.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
