∎ [PDF] Gratis Camera Lucida Reflections on Photography Roland Barthes Richard Howard 9780809013982 Books

Camera Lucida Reflections on Photography Roland Barthes Richard Howard 9780809013982 Books

Download As PDF : Camera Lucida Reflections on Photography Roland Barthes Richard Howard 9780809013982 Books

Camera Lucida Reflections on Photography Roland Barthes Richard Howard 9780809013982 Books

I like reading Barthes essays on various aspects of society. This book is a little slow going in the beginning but does get better as it goes. It is not for the reader with a casual interest in photography but for someone who is interested in understanding the deeper issues that lay in photography and what it means to photograph and be photographed.


Tags : Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [Roland Barthes, Richard Howard] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <div>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,Roland Barthes, Richard Howard,Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,Hill and Wang,0374521344,Criticism,Aesthetics,History,Philosophy Of Art,Photo Techniques,Photography,Photography Criticism,Photography As An Art,Semiotics & Theory

Camera Lucida Reflections on Photography Roland Barthes Richard Howard 9780809013982 Books Reviews

Interesting but esoteric, not so much about photography as about how to feel about photography or how to understand the word "photograph".
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An interesting book, not something that I would have read had it not been required. Nonetheless Barthes raises many interesting points and I am sure that for someone involved in photography it would be a much more engaging read. Even for me it proved palatable.
Nice insights into the meaning and difference of photographs. Barthes covers mainly portraits and doesn't analyze landscape or still life photography. Also, he doesn't make any comparisons with paintings, which would have made it more interesting. His final chapter on photography as DOA is profound.
This book never cease to make me think about the role of pictures and the way it seduces our senses and memory that is difficult to explain by words. A lot of people arguing on the Barthes insistence on the aura of the pictures, though it's remaining true since the early invention of photography. I'm intrigued by this essay and continually fascinated by this search for meaning in the object of picture. Highly recommended!
It's a textbook. It did it's job. Nothing to really ride home about.
Camera Lucida provides a moving and insightful tribute to the author's mother. However, to my mind, the thinking about photography is rather less valuable.

Barthes begins by announcing that the subject compels him to dispense with the compulsion to theorizing that seems endemic to French academic writing. A promising and welcome beginning. But Theory keeps intruding, in the form of jargon (the distinction between Operator, Spectator and Spectrum, which is pretty much dropped shortly after being introduced), various dichotomies (which tend to be introduced for the primary purpose of being subverted), the generation of paradoxes, and the usual rather melodramatic "last word" concerning the inexpressible, the ineffable, and of course Death. Despite his promise to utilize as data his own personal experience of photographs in order to reach the essence of "Photography" [sic], Barthes never manages to get beyond the framework of "representation", "likeness" and "referent", all concepts (dating back to Barthes' early work in semiology) that tend to obfuscate rather than reveal how photographs present themselves to our minds. For the first thing to notice about a photograph is that it does not provide a "likeness" of a thing but rather the thing itself, the difference being that in the photograph the thing doesn't exist (here, now). In other words, the theoretical apparatus surrounding the concept of representation is inherently inadequate to understand what a photograph is, but Barthes relies on it (even if in a negative mode) from start to finish. Also annoying is the preciosity of the writing (its delight in its look and sound, suggesting an aesthete rather than a thinker), and the (again) characteristic striving for brilliance for its own sake. It's easier to appear brilliant when obfuscating than when enlightening, because philosophical and aesthetic truth is discovered not when we learn something new (via fresh information or neologisms) but rather when we are able to recall something we already know, but for some reason are unable to acknowledge. For these reasons, I find Barthes' reflections on photography to be at times very interesting and subtle but of limited value.
I like reading Barthes essays on various aspects of society. This book is a little slow going in the beginning but does get better as it goes. It is not for the reader with a casual interest in photography but for someone who is interested in understanding the deeper issues that lay in photography and what it means to photograph and be photographed.