Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's <i>Camera Lucida</i>

Author:   Geoffrey Batchen (University of Oxford) ,  Geoffrey Batchen (University of Oxford) ,  Victor Burgin ,  Jane Gallop
Publisher:   MIT Press Ltd
ISBN:  

9780262013253


Pages:   298
Publication Date:   11 September 2009
Recommended Age:   From 18 years
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's <i>Camera Lucida</i>


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Overview

An essential guide to an essential book, this first anthology on Camera Lucida offers critical perspectives on Barthes's influential text.Roland Barthes's 1980 book Camera Lucida is perhaps the most influential book ever published on photography. The terms studium and punctum, coined by Barthes for two different ways of responding to photographs, are part of the standard lexicon for discussions of photography; Barthes's understanding of photographic time and the relationship he forges between photography and death have been invoked countless times in photographic discourse; and the current interest in vernacular photographs and the ubiquity of subjective, even novelistic, ways of writing about photography both owe something to Barthes. Photography Degree Zero, the first anthology of writings on Camera Lucida, goes beyond the usual critical orthodoxies to offer a range of perspectives on Barthes's important book.Photography Degree Zero (the title links Barthes's first book, Writing Degree Zero, to his last, Camera Lucida) includes essays written soon after Barthes's book appeared as well as more recent rereadings of it, some previously unpublished. The contributors' approaches range from psychoanalytical (in an essay drawing on the work of Lacan) to Buddhist (in an essay that compares the photographic flash to the mystic's light of revelation); they include a history of Barthes's writings on photography and an account of Camera Lucida and its reception; two views of the book through the lens of race; and a provocative essay by Michael Fried and two responses to it. The variety of perspectives included in Photography Degree Zero, and the focus on Camera Lucida in the context of photography rather than literature or philosophy, serve to reopen a vital conversation on Barthes's influential work.

Full Product Details

Author:   Geoffrey Batchen (University of Oxford) ,  Geoffrey Batchen (University of Oxford) ,  Victor Burgin ,  Jane Gallop
Publisher:   MIT Press Ltd
Imprint:   MIT Press
Dimensions:   Width: 19.10cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.703kg
ISBN:  

9780262013253


ISBN 10:   0262013258
Pages:   298
Publication Date:   11 September 2009
Recommended Age:   From 18 years
Audience:   General/trade ,  General/trade ,  General ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   No Longer Our Product
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

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Reviews

It will no doubt become a portable authority on Barthes and visual-arts scholarship. -- Erik Morse, Modern Painters Photography Degree Zero brings together much of the best writing on Barthes' Camera Lucida and adds several stimulating new essays. It is a great boon for anyone deeply interested in photography, and I will be consulting my copy frequently for years to come. --Robin Kelsey, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University As the lucid essays gathered in Photography Degree Zero amply demonstrate, over twenty-five years after its original publication, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida remains one of the most significant books to have been written on the photographic experience. Tracking the book's reception history in the Anglophone world, this exciting volume ranges across the decades and presents the distinct and provocative points of view of leading scholars. A decisive contribution to our understanding of the influential ideas that Camera Lucida has bequeathed us, this collection promises to become an important touchstone in its own right. --Andrea Noble, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, and Member, Centre for Advanced Photography Studies, Durham University, UK Like Camera Lucida, Photography Degree Zero is a story of love and loss. These fourteen astute close readings of Roland Barthes's last book, masterfully assembled and introduced by Geoffrey Batchen, grapple with Barthes's brilliant insights and quirks, and with his disappointing limitations and misreadings. An essential companion to Camera Lucida, this rewarding volume is less an attempt to get it 'out of our system' than a testament to its continued relevance as we think about photography's evolution and, in Barthes' terms, its 'death.' --Marianne Hirsch, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Codirector, Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, Columbia University


As the lucid essays gathered in Photography Degree Zero amply demonstrate, over twenty-five years after its original publication, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida remains one of the most significant books to have been written on the photographic experience. Tracking the book's reception history in the Anglophone world, this exciting volume ranges across the decades and presents the distinct and provocative points of view of leading scholars. A decisive contribution to our understanding of the influential ideas that Camera Lucida has bequeathed us, this collection promises to become an important touchstone in its own right. --Andrea Noble, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, and Member, Centre for Advanced Photography Studies, Durham University, UK It will no doubt become a portable authority on Barthes and visual-arts scholarship. Erik Morse Modern Painters


It will no doubt become a portable authority on Barthes and visual-arts scholarship.—Erik Morse, Modern Painters


Author Information

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conceptions of Photography (1999) and Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2002), both published by the MIT Press. Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conceptions of Photography (1999) and Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2002), both published by the MIT Press. Margaret Iversen is Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. Her books include Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory and Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes. Eduardo Cadava, a writer, translator, and scholar, is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, coeditor of The Itinerant Languages of Photography, and Professor of English at Princeton University. Rosalind E. Krauss is University Professor in the Department of Art History at Columbia University, where, from 1995 to 2006, she held the Meyer Schapiro Chair in Modern Art and Theory. She is a founding editor of October and the author of Passages in Modern Sculpture, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths, The Optical Unconscious, Bachelors, Perpetual Inventory, Under Blue Cup (all published by the MIT Press), and other books.

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