Photography Degree Zero

Author: Geoffrey Batchen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Roland Barthes's 1980 book Camera Lucidais perhaps the most influential book ever published on photography. The terms studiumand punctum,coined by Barthes for two different ways of responding 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 and death have been invoked countless times in photographic discourse; and the current interest in vernacular photographs and the ubiquity of subjective, even novelistic, ways of writing about photography both owe something to Barthes. Photography Degree Zero,the first anthology of writings on Camera Lucida,goes beyond the usual critical orthodoxies to offer a range of perspectives on Barthes's important book. Photography Degree Zero(the title links Barthes's first book, Writing Degree Zero,to his last, Camera Lucida)includes essays written soon after Barthes's book appeared as well as more recent rereadings of it, some previously unpublished. The contributors' approaches range from psychoanalytical (in an essay drawing on the work of Lacan) to Buddhist (in an essay that compares the photographic flash to the mystic's light of revelation); they include a history of Barthes's writings on photography and an account of Camera Lucidaand its reception; two views of the 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 Lucidain the context of photography rather than literature or philosophy, serve to reopen a vital conversation on Barthes's influential work. Contributors: Geoffrey Batchen, Victor Burgin, Eduardo Cadava, Paolo Cortes-Rocca, James Elkins, Michael Fried, Jane Gallop, Gordon Hughes, Margaret Iverson, Rosalind E. Krauss, Carol Mavor, Margaret Olin, Jay Prosser, Shawn Michelle Smith

Camera Lucida

Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374521344
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description
"Examining the themes of presence and absence, the relationship between photography and theatre, history and death, these 'reflections on photography' begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind."--Alibris.

Seeing Degree Zero

Author: Bishop Ryan Bishop
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474431445
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 556

Book Description
In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes' 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as just one starting point, this volume examines the historical, theoretical and visual impact of the term and draws directly upon the editors' ongoing collaboration with artist and writer Victor Burgin. The book is composed of key chapters by the editors and Burgin, a series of collaborative texts with Burgin and four commissioned essays concerned with the relationship between Barthes and Burgin in the context of the spectatorship of art. It includes an in-depth dialogue regarding Burgin's long-term reading of Barthes and a lengthy image-text, offering critical exploration of the Image (in echo of earlier theories of the Text). Also included are translations of two projections works by Burgin, 'Belledonne' and 'Prairie', which work alongside and inform the collected essays. Overall, the book provides a combined reading of both Barthes and Burgin, which in turn leads to new considerations of visual culture, the spectatorship of art and the political aesthetic.

What Photography Is

Author: James Elkins
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135844437
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
In What Photography Is, James Elkins examines the strange and alluring power of photography in the same provocative and evocative manner as he explored oil painting in his best-selling What Painting Is. In the course of an extended imaginary dialogue with Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Elkins argues that photography is also about meaninglessness--its apparently endless capacity to show us things that we do not want or need to see--and also about pain, because extremely powerful images can sear permanently into our consciousness. Extensively illustrated with a surprising range of images, the book demonstrates that what makes photography uniquely powerful is its ability to express the difficulty--physical, psychological, emotional, and aesthetic--of the act of seeing.

Performance Degree Zero

Author: Timothy Scheie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780802090713
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Throughout his career, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) had a complex and often uneasy relationship with theatre and performance. In Performance Degree Zero, Timothy Scheie argues that Barthes's body of work must be considered a lifelong engagement with theatre. Exploring his changing critical methodologies, Scheie provides a new understanding of the rapid shifts in critical modes Barthes traverses, from a Sartrean Marxism in the 1950s, through semiology, to French post-structuralism and the mournful introspection of his later years. The theatrical figure illuminates Barthes's accounts of the sign, the text, the body, homosexuality, love, the voice, photography, and other important and contested terms of his thought. "Performance Degree Zero"offers the first comprehensive account of Barthes's lifelong engagement with theatre and performance.

Forget Photography

Author: Andrew Dewdney
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1912685817
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Why we must forget photography and reject the frame of reality it prescribes and delineates. The central paradox this book explores is that at the moment of photography's replacement by the algorithm and data flow, photographic cultures proliferate as never before. The afterlife of photography, residual as it may technically be, maintains a powerful cultural and representational hold on reality, which is important to understand in relationship to the new conditions. Forgetting photography is a strategy to reveal the redundant historicity of the photographic constellation and the cultural immobility of its epicenter. It attempts to liberate the image from these historic shackles, forged by art history and photographic theory. More important, perhaps, forgetting photography also entails rejecting the frame of reality it prescribes and delineates, and in doing so opens up other relationships between bodies, times, events, materials, memory, representation and the image. Forgetting photography attempts to develop a systematic method for revealing the limits and prescriptions of thinking with photography, which no amount of revisionism of post-photographic theory can get beyond. The world urgently needs to unthink photography and go beyond it in order to understand the present constitution of the image as well as the reality or world it shows. Forgetting photography will require a different way of organizing knowledge about the visual in culture that involves crossing different knowledges of visual culture, technologies, and mediums. It will also involve thinking differently about routine and creative labor and its knowledge practices within the institutions and organization of visual reproduction.

Touching Photographs

Author: Margaret Olin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226626466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world. Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes’s family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and logs onto online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, Touching Photographs is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history.

Keeper of the Hearth

Author: Odette England
Publisher: Schilt Publishing
ISBN: 9789053309377
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This lavish book marks the 40th anniversary of Barthes' renowned work Camera Lucida in 2020. Artist Odette England invited 199 of the world's best-known contemporary photographers, writers, critics, curators and art historians to contribute an image or text that reflects on Barthes' unpublished snapshot of his mother, aged five. This snapshot is known as the winter garden photograph. Barthes discusses it at length in Camera Lucida, but never reproduces it. It is one of the most famous unseen photographs in the world.

Each Wild Idea

Author: Geoffrey Batchen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262523240
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Book Description
Essays on photography and the medium's history and evolving identity. In Each Wild Idea, Geoffrey Batchen explores a wide range of photographic subjects, from the timing of the medium's invention to the various implications of cyberculture. Along the way, he reflects on contemporary art photography, the role of the vernacular in photography's history, and the Australianness of Australian photography. The essays all focus on a consideration of specific photographs—from a humble combination of baby photos and bronzed booties to a masterwork by Alfred Stieglitz. Although Batchen views each photograph within the context of broader social and political forces, he also engages its own distinctive formal attributes. In short, he sees photography as something that is simultaneously material and cultural. In an effort to evoke the lived experience of history, he frequently relies on sheer description as the mode of analysis, insisting that we look right at—rather than beyond—the photograph being discussed. A constant theme throughout the book is the question of photography's past, present, and future identity.

Mould

Author: Joan Fontcuberta
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788894036817
Category : Art, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description