Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Review
"This is a great book--flawed, impossible, infuriating, and moving . . . but he 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."--Douglas Davis, Newsweek



Review
"This is a great book--flawed, impossible, infuriating, and moving . . . but he 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."--Douglas Davis, Newsweek



Book Description
This personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume--and the last book Barthes published--finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography. To this end, several black-and-white photos (by the likes of Avedon, Clifford, Hine, Mapplethorpe, Nadar, Van Der Zee, and so forth) are reprinted throughout the text.



Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)


About the Author
Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and the classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Romania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a professor at the College de France until his death in 1980.



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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


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