Camera Lucida - REDZET Editions

Camera Lucida
(La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie)

Олена Олександра Червоник & MOKSOP, moksop.org

Camera Lucida is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. He was not a photographer, and in that sense, the book seems controversial.

It is a novel and an analytical philosophical work at the same time.

The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator. Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind.

Camera Lucida consists of 48 chapters divided into two parts.

Barthes does not present a fixed thesis, but instead, highlights the evolution of his thought process. He consistently returns to ideas expressed in previous chapters to complete them, or even deny them.

Barthes's analysis of photography develops more detail and insight through a structuralist approach. His examples deal with press photographs and advertising.

Published two months before his death in 1980, Camera Lucida is Barthes's first and only book devoted to photography. It was one of the most important early academic books of criticism and theorization on photography.

The Ukrainian translation was made by Olena Chervonik, who has a degree in art history and is a practicing curator.

The book was published by the Museum of the Kharkiv School of Photography with the support of the Institut français d'Ukraine in 2022.

Ukrainian Language
180х110 mm, 176 p.

ISBN: 978-3-947922-08-6