roland barthes camera lucida reflections on photography

This essay explores how Camera Lucida “traveled,” as a piece of both visual theory and personal reflection, to the Israel of the first Intifada and its aftermath. Accordingly, this essay examines the ways in which aspects of Benjamin’s critical approach to the medium have influenced and shaped Barthes’ text.įollowing the 1988 translation of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida into Hebrew, Ronit Matalon, an Israeli writer of Egyptian extraction, began interpolating Barthes into her writing, in part through unacknowledged quotations. However, these observations aside, there has been little attempt in the literature to follow the development, alteration, or continuity of Benjamin’s ideas within Barthes’ analysis of photography. Recent scholarship has highlighted a number of other correspondences between the two works. When comparing Camera Lucida with this 1977 special issue, one is immediately struck by the fact that Barthes’s short book, which itself contains only twenty-five images, took six of its photographs directly from the pages of Nouvel Observateur.

An English translation of Barthes’ text was subsequently published in 1981 under the title Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography.

In the late spring of 1979, roughly a year and a half after the appearance of Benjamin’s essay in Nouvel Observateur, Roland Barthes completed a manuscript subsequently entitled La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie, which delineated his own critical approach to the medium of photography. Re-titled Les analphabetes de l’avenir, the essay was only the second translation of Benjamin’s Kleine Geschichte der Photographie to appear in French, with the original 1931 German version having been published in the Berlin periodical Die literarische Welt during the last years of the Weimar Republic. In November of 1977, a French translation of Walter Benjamin’s, Little History of Photography was included in a special issue of the prominent Parisian magazine, Nouvel Observateur.

Roland barthes camera lucida reflections on photography