Camera Lucida: Vintage Design Edition

Often recommended as a classic book about photography, this philosophical treatise starts well enough, but slowly devolves into repetition. If photography is important to you in a deep way, you probably should give this slim volume a chance. In our modern preoccupation with bits and bytes of superficial information, you may not finish it.

Educación

It’s exciting that Vintage has wrestled this extraordinarily important book from the grip of Hill and Wang, who, though they had the courage to publish it many years ago and to keep it in print, steadfastly refuse to issue a digital version, or a version with quality printing of the photographs, which, duh, are the point of Barthes’s message. And of all thinkers whose work should be shared as widely as possible — especially in digital form, since the onslaught of images lies there — it is Barthes.Does anyone know why the publisher(s) is not being more generous? Some perverse legal dispute?

Makes you think

This has not aged well. It’s tough to read, somewhat misogynistic and at least half is pretentiously waffling over the same points repeatedly. There are some wonderful points in here such as the concept of studium and punctum, or a photograph effectively being invisible, but these points are lost amid the anecdotal ramblings of someone who wasn’t a photographer. The cover is incredible, but many photos mentioned by the author aren’t in the book, requiring the reader to dig around or have an existing broad knowledge of the subject. I’m glad I’ve read it as finishing felt like an achievement.Borrow someone else’s, skim through, return it.

Buena edición, interesante la lectura de este libro sobre la esencia de la fotografía.

Excellent