Saturday, December 3, 2016

Response to Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes
Camera Lucida
1980

Roland Barthes is a literary theorist and philosopher. He published this book partly as a eulogy to his late mother. The book is broken down into two parts each with short thoughts about photography. He develops two terms to talk about the different realms a photograph can exist in.

studium: cultural, linguistic and political interpretation

punctum: personal detail, relationship it has to the object or person that was photographed

Quotes:
"What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repairs what could never be repeated existentially." - pg.4

"The fatality (no photograph without something or someone) involves Photography in the vast disorder of objects-of all the objects in the world: why choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other." - pg.6

"For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity." - pg.12

"It seems that in Latin 'photograph' would be said 'imago lucid opera expressa'; which is to say: image revealed, 'extracted', 'mounted', 'expressed' (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light." - pg.81

I like this book and it was nice to come back to it. I read it in undergraduate and re-reading it again gives me a new perspective. I also enjoy a lot of his commentary on photography vs. cinema, although that wasn't in the assigned sections.

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