Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
A Flamingo paperback of Roland Barthes's 1980 meditation on photography, written after the death of his mother and organized around the contrast between the studium and the punctum. Barthes examines specific photographs—a news image, a portrait by Kertész, the photograph of his mother as a child—and uses them to ask what a photograph does to the person who looks at it. The Flamingo edition is the compact UK paperback, with the plain cover and the thin paper that Flamingo used for translated theory in the 1980s. The margins are narrow and the type is small enough to encourage underlining. Ideal reader: the photographer who wants a theory that begins with grief rather than technique, or the reader who has ever looked at an old photograph and felt the past demand something from the present.
