Born 1915, died 1980.
Barthes works such as Camera Lucida and Image, Music, Text, are the staple of all student wishing to study photography beyond the physical use of the camera. His work on Semiotics is invaluable when it comes to reading and understanding an image.
Camera Lucida was Barthes’ last publication, and has a poignant side to it. It is in many ways an eulogy to his mother as well as having it’s relevance in photography. It’s structure is much less formal than you would expect and as you read deeper into the book you realise that there is a lot of referring back to things he has written earlier. This I found very refreshing, as on occasions he even questions things that he has written. There were things that I had questioned (or disagreed with at the time of reading), which, later in the book he goes back to, and if not corrects, draws into question.
I found this form of presentation a lot easier to read, having read it as though it were a story, rather than Image, Music, Text which I treated as a text book that I would refer to as required.
In IMT, his demonstration of how he reads the image of the string bag with the food/ingredients in, is very informative and helped me on a number of ocassions, in particular with assignment 4 on Context & narrative.
I see! 