Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida
Author(s): Geoffrey Batchen
Roland Barthes's 1980 book Camera Lucida is perhaps the most influential book ever published on photography. The terms studium and punctum, coined by Barthes for two different ways of responding to photographs, are part of the standard lexicon for discussions of photography; Barthes's understanding of photographic time and the relationship he forges between photography and death have been invoked countless times in photographic discourse; and the current interest in vernacular photographs and the ubiquity of subjective, even novelistic, ways of writing about photography both owe something to Barthes. Photography Degree Zero, the first anthology of writings on Camera Lucida, goes beyond the usual critical orthodoxies to offer a range of perspectives on Barthes's important book. Photography Degree Zero (the title links Barthes's first book, Writing Degree Zero, to his last, Camera Lucida) includes essays written soon after Barthes's book appeared as well as more recent rereadings of it, some previously unpublished. The contributors' approaches range from psychoanalytical (in an essay drawing on the work of Lacan) to Buddhist (in an essay that compares the photographic flash to the mystic's light of revelation); they include a history of Barthes's writings on photography and an account of Camera Lucida and its reception; two views of the book through the lens of race; and a provocative essay by Michael Fried and two responses to it. The variety of perspectives included in Photography Degree Zero, and the focus on Camera Lucida in the context of photography rather than literature or philosophy, serve to reopen a vital conversation on Barthes's influential work.
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"As the lucid essays gathered in Photography Degree Zero amply demonstrate, over twenty-five years after its original publication, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida remains one of the most significant books to have been written on the photographic experience. Tracking the book's reception history in the Anglophone world, this exciting volume ranges across the decades and presents the distinct and provocative points of view of leading scholars. A decisive contribution to our understanding of the influential ideas that Camera Lucida has bequeathed us, this collection promises to become an important touchstone in its own right."--Andrea Noble, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, and Member, Centre for Advanced Photography Studies, Durham University, UK
"It will no doubt become a portable authority on Barthes and visual-arts scholarship." Erik Morse Modern Painters
Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conceptions of Photography (1999) and Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2002), both published by the MIT Press.
General Fields
- :
- : MIT Press Ltd
- : MIT Press
- : 01 August 2011
- : United States
- : books
Special Fields
- : Geoffrey Batchen
- : Paperback
- : 911
- : 779.092
- : 304
- : 5 black & white illustrations, 5 b&w illus.
