Camera Lucida (French: La chambre claire) is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes, Photography cannot signify except by assuming a mask. Camera Lucida is Barthes’ last work and is in many ways a summa of poststructuralist theory. The basic optics were described 200 years earlier by Johannes Kepler in his Dioptrice (1611), but there is no evidence he or his contemporaries constructed a working camera lucida. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes, Photography cannot signify except by assuming a mask. The mask is the outward shell of a body that exists in the photo. The overall project of Barthe’s Camera Lucida is to determine a new mode of observation and, ultimately, a new consciousness by way of Photography. The camera lucida was patented in 1806 by William Hyde Wollaston.
By the 19th century, Kepler's description had fallen into oblivion, so Wollaston's claim was never challenged. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes' late mother. A not-so-short summary of Camera Lucida Starting with his fascination for Napoleon’s younger brother’s portrait, the author describes his journey to discovering what photography is “in itself”. He focused particularly on the consideration by Barthes of the Winter Graden image of his mother. The mask is the outward shell of a body that exists in the photo. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum"). It was written after the death of his mother and before he died (perhaps committed suicide) in a traffic accident. Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida – summary February 28, 2018 Learning Log My tutor advised that I look at Camera Lucida as part of my research for assignment 4. It is a summa of Barthes’s life and work too. ‘Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner’, he writes, ‘a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see’. In Camera Lucida, the French philosopher moves away from the semiotics of binary oppositions and effectively envisages photography as a signifier without a signified.
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