Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida”

Roland Barthes's 1980 book Camera Lucida is perhaps the most influential book everpublished on photography. The terms studium and punctum, coined by Barthes for two different ways ofresponding to photographs, are part of the standard lexicon for discussions of photography;Barthes's understanding of photographic time and the relationship he forges between photography anddeath have been invoked countless times in photographic discourse; and the current interest invernacular photographs and the ubiquity of subjective, even novelistic, ways of writing aboutphotography both owe something to Barthes. Photography Degree Zero, the first anthology of writingson Camera Lucida, goes beyond the usual critical orthodoxies to offer a range of perspectives onBarthes's important book. Photography Degree Zero (the title links Barthes's first book, WritingDegree Zero, to his last, Camera Lucida) includes essays written soon after Barthes's book appearedas well as more recent rereadings of it, some previously unpublished. The contributors' approachesrange from psychoanalytical (in an essay drawing on the work of Lacan) to Buddhist (in an essay thatcompares the photographic flash to the mystic's light of revelation); they include a history ofBarthes's writings on photography and an account of Camera Lucida and its reception; two views ofthe book through the lens of race; and a provocative essay by Michael Fried and two responses to it.The variety of perspectives included in Photography Degree Zero, and the focus on Camera Lucida inthe context of photography rather than literature or philosophy, serve to reopen a vitalconversation on Barthes's influential work.