![]() ![]() ![]() This strongly emphasizes the realist view that the photograph is the referent, and it is pointless to speak of the photograph as some sort of entity with its own life, unshackled from the referent. Furthermore, each photograph is intrinsically bound to this event, or referent (or vice versa): the referent cannot be photographed again, the photograph cannot be retaken in order to point to a different referent. His first insight is that a photography captures a unique event that can never re-occur. He rejects the idea of trying to understand photography in terms of classification systems on the grounds that those systems can just as easily be applied to other forms of visual representation and hence can’t possibly get to the heart of photography’s uniqueness. This post covers parts 1, 2,4 and 5 of the original text.īarthes commences by describing how a photograph of Napoleon’s brother caused him to start questioning what is the essence of photography’s uniqueness, and to what extent photography has a ‘genius’ of it’s own. I’ve been reading extracts from it as published in The Photography Reader (ed. ![]() ![]() Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida is a classic text of the realist school of Photography theory. From The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells ![]()
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