Twenty-seven years after its first publication, Victor Burgin’s 1982 essay “Rereading Camera Lucida”-it seems that the act of returning to this book was already at issue even then-places Barthes’s late reflections on photography in the context of his earlier texts on the medium, which culminate in his elaboration of the idea of an “obtuse meaning” in 1971. One set of answers is to be found in the first half of Batchen’s collection, among theoretical responses to Barthes’s text that are themselves now canonical and which, though enlightening in their different approaches, might also be said to stand in the way of a clear-sighted reading of the book. But the book swiftly established a sort of spectral hegemony over discussions of photography.Īs Geoffrey Batchen points out in his introduction to the timely and essential collection of essays Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (MIT Press, 2009), it was “perhaps the most influential book yet written about the photographic experience.” This compendium, which brings together published and new writings, attempts to trace the history of that influence and say what it might consist of today, because beyond certain code words-“punctum,” “flat death,” “Winter Garden,” and “mother,” among others-that quicken the heart of the sympathetic reader, it is remarkably unclear why we continue to read Camera Lucida. On its publication in 1980, Camera Lucida seemed to some lamentably slight, not to say-in its apparent flight into the private sphere-frankly at odds with the critique of the image that its author had ushered in over the previous two decades. Rarely has a critical work of such modest dimensions cast such a deep shadow over subsequent scholarship as Roland Barthes’s final book, Camera Lucida-a svelte “Note sur la photographie” according to the original subtitle (fattened to “Reflections on Photography” in Richard Howard’s translation).
PHOTOGRAPHY DEGREE ZERO: REFLECTIONS ON ROLAND BARTHES'S CAMERA LUCIDA
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