In contemporary writing on photography, there is probably no text whose value and importance is as taken for granted as Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. So great is its reach and influence that it is cited approvingly both in popular non-academic books on photography and in the densest of critical works, as well as enjoying a privileged position in writing on mourning and memory, where the author's grief over his mother's death has found many admirers and imitators. It is slightly odd to find Barthes, the scourge of all doxa, so universally appreciated. It is also easy to forget that this was by no means always the case. Although it made a full recovery, Camera Lucida was initially greeted by a flurry of detractors from a politicised segment of AngloAmerican photography theorists who excoriated the book for its ontological essentialism, or lamented its sentimentality and apparent humanist deviation. (1) Indeed, the force of the reaction it originally elicited gives a good sense of the challenge that it posed to thinking on the photographic. Once a necessary shock to the orthodoxies of semiotic or historicist analysis of photography, it has now become so orthodox that its inclusion, extracted, in anthologies, is inevitable, and it is even considered hors categorie, as, for instance, in The Photography Reader, where it takes pride of place as the inaugurating piece, out of chronological order. (2)
...More
Article
Buse, Peter;
(2008)
Surely Fades Away: Polaroid Photography and the Contradictions of Cultural Value
(/isis/citation/CBB001181521/)
Book
West, Nancy Martha;
(2000)
Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia
(/isis/citation/CBB000501918/)
Essay Review
Gordon, Tammy S.;
(2013)
Visual Agency: The Photograph as and Instrument for Change
(/isis/citation/CBB001567163/)
Book
Nicole Dawn Strathman;
(2020)
Through a Native lens: American Indian photography
(/isis/citation/CBB335028160/)
Book
Monte, Almerinda;
Roeling, Monika;
Reijenga, Jetse;
(2007)
Photography and Sustainability in Historical Perspective
(/isis/citation/CBB000773068/)
Book
Geoff Bender;
Rasmus R. Simonsen;
(2021)
Photography’s Materialities: Transatlantic Photographic Practices over the Long Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB105087553/)
Book
Anthony F. Arrigo;
(2014)
Imaging Hoover Dam: the Making of a Cultural Icon
(/isis/citation/CBB752609542/)
Book
Beegan, Gerry;
(2007)
The Mass Image. A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London
(/isis/citation/CBB001201134/)
Book
Willumson, Glenn;
(2013)
Iron Muse: Photographing the Transcontinental Railroad
(/isis/citation/CBB001320948/)
Book
Kerry Ross;
(2015)
Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
(/isis/citation/CBB755143266/)
Article
Buse, Peter;
(2010)
The polaroid image as photo object
(/isis/citation/CBB001181525/)
Book
Julia Van Haaften;
(2018)
Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography
(/isis/citation/CBB123130789/)
Book
Edwards, Elizabeth;
(2012)
The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885--1918
(/isis/citation/CBB001212708/)
Book
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee;
(2009)
American Consumer Society, 1865--2005: From Hearth to HDTV
(/isis/citation/CBB001201132/)
Book
Kristen Gallerneaux;
(2018)
High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres & the Object Hereafter
(/isis/citation/CBB213341622/)
Book
David Eggleton;
(2006)
Into the Light: A History of New Zealand Photography
(/isis/citation/CBB680263052/)
Book
Peter Buse;
(2016)
The camera does the rest: How Polaroid changed photography
(/isis/citation/CBB258603487/)
Book
Wallace, Maurice O.;
Smith, Shawn Michelle;
(2012)
Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity
(/isis/citation/CBB001550214/)
Book
Thomas Stubblefield;
(2015)
9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster
(/isis/citation/CBB335939933/)
Book
Jackson, Donald C.;
(2013)
Pastoral and Monumental: Dams, Postcards, and the American Landscape
(/isis/citation/CBB001321155/)
Be the first to comment!