Camera Lucida

Reflections on Photography

By: Roland Barthes

Narrated by: James Gillies

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes's personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume—and the last book he published—finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography.

Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium.

This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on the subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.

This audiobook is expressively read by James Gillies, with audio engineering by Matthew Kulewicz, MPSE. It was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

©1980 Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, translation ©1981 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. (P)2025 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

Interesting

Barthes' observations on photography from his feelings, detached from technical aspect of the activity shines light on the soul of the subject. It opens the discipline from purely a tool of skill and mechanical capability to be something that created to capture time, soul and attitude.