If you can blame this book for anything, it’s not very high-quality illustrations. Trying to create a philosophy of photography, a well-known thinker of the twentieth century turned to absolutely specific shots.
If you can blame this book for anything, it’s not very high-quality illustrations. Trying to create a philosophy of photography, a well-known thinker of the twentieth century turned to absolutely specific shots. The tension with which he peers into them, trying to understand what attracts him in famous and obscure photographs, is felt in the text almost physically. It is all the more offensive that the photographs themselves are not reproduced very clearly and it is almost impossible to share the visual experience of the philosopher. Fortunately, this is the only reproach. Camera lucida (the name can be translated from Latin as «bright room») is written in a simpler and more emotional way than many of Barthes’ classical works. Emotions are understandable: he was prompted to create a book by the analysis of photographs found after the death of his beloved mother. Roland Barthes does not care about the technique of shooting and reasoning about the art of photography. He writes about time, life, death and the place of man in the world. With amazing ease, revealing the connection between photography and the basic concepts of philosophy. And with the fearlessness of the doomed, following into the abyss of the paradoxes he himself had just formulated. One of which is beautifully illustrated on the cover of the book. On it is a portrait of a young man sentenced to death 150 years ago. Sentenced to death in the future, which has long since become the past, he, frozen in the picture, is he alive or dead?
TO THE MARGIN, 272 c.