Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida

Title: Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida
Published by: Vintage, London
Release Date: 2000
Contributors: Roland BARTHES
Genre: theory / elmélet
Pages: 120
ISBN13: 978-0-099-22541-6

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Roland Barthes’s essential study explores the nature of photography through the search for its special ‘genius’.

Although Roland Barthes often used photographic materials in his structuralist analyses of the bourgeois myths in mass culture and advertising, it was not until his last years that he published a collection of essays entirely devoted to photography. In Camera Lucida, the French philosopher moves away from the semiotics of binary oppositions and effectively envisages photography as a signifier without a signified. ‘Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner’, he writes, ‘a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see’. And ‘… the photograph is never distinguished from its referent’. According to Barthes, this ‘adherence’ of the referent makes it hard to formulate photography’s fundamental feature, ‘the universal, without which there would be no Photography’.