camera lucida reflections on photography

This is the photograph as a purely representational artifact - the product of light rays, entering a camera from the surface of a tiny corner of reality. It doesn’t need a code (or shouldn’t) because in theory, the message of a photograph is reality itself. In perhaps his most famous statement on photography (made before he wrote 'Camera Lucida') he suggests that the photograph is a semiotically unique, paradoxical artifact - unique because it is a “message without a code”. He wanted to get to grips with what photographs are and what makes them unique. He was not a photographer - “too impatient for that” - and had no interest in investigating photography as an activity. As Louis Daguerre said, the photograph “gives Nature an ability to reproduce herself”īarthes thought that photography is actually closer to theatre than to painting (because of its direct line of connection to life). Just remember Kodak’s famous slogan: “You push the button, we do the rest”.

In many circles, photography is still considered the poor cousin of ‘real’ art and it’s easy to understand why. Consider also that to ‘make’ a photograph takes no training. You can’t ‘read’ a photograph like you can text (which is the kind of thing that annoys the hell out of semiologists), and being by its nature infinitely reproducible, a photograph doesn’t have the uniqueness of a painting. You do not need to know anything about philosophy to read 'Camera Lucida' and you might actually enjoy it more if you don't. Photography didn’t attract much academic interest until the 1970s and 80s, and 'Camera Lucida', alongside Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ is among the most influential (and enjoyable) books of its period to deal with photography as a cultural phenomenon, not just in the obvious way, as an art and practise. The reason I’m writing about Roland Barthes on DPReview is that Barthes was fascinated by photography, and wrote one of my all-time favorite books about it - ‘Camera Lucida', published in 1980.

Reading the work of certain semiologists is like trying to argue with a hungry 3-year old who has an MA. That joke (and variations on it) are, trust me, the only funny thing that has ever come out of semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstructionism. When the king of the deconstructionists Jacques Derrida (of whose work ‘abstruse’ would count as a highly charitable description) passed away in 2004, satirical website The Onion ran a single sentence headline: ' Jacques Derrida “dies” '. For obvious reasons, academic texts that deal with semiotics (and structuralism, and post-structuralism, and deconstructivism) tend towards the abstruse. It was as a semiologist that Barthes (b 1915 - d 1980) was best known, and in simple terms, semiotics is the study of signs, symbols and their meaning. If you’ve never heard of Roland Barthes, congrats - clearly you were never forced to study structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism or semiotics.

Camera lucida reflections on photography