Race and reproduction in Camera Lucida

Abstract

In his inuential study of photography, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes famously makes himself the measure of photographic meaning (1981: 9). The book, in his words, is an attempt ‘to formulate the fundamental feature’ of photography ‘starting from a few personal impulses’ to a few photographs (8-9). In other words, Barthes seeks to discover the essential elements of photography through his own particular responses to images. It is this profoundly personal treatment of photography that lends Camera Lucida both its most evocative power and its most frustrating limitations.

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