Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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."

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

Nothing is more present or more mysterious, still, than the Photograph--so one blinks only at Barthes' assumption, at the start of these meditations on its nature, that he is doing something exceptional. More unusual, for such endeavors and for Barthes, is his directness (rendered in limpid prose by Richard Howard). What is there in certain photographs, he asks, that attracts me? The investigation, then, is subjective--no visual-arts touchstones, no socioeconomic ballast. Barthes distinguishes between a general interest in a scene, which he calls (with his penchant for coining terms) the stadium, and something ""which arises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me"": the puncture. Though he errs in supposing that the punctum, in the photographs he cites, is necessarily accidental (surely the Nicaraguan nuns were as important to photographer Koen Wessing as the Nicaraguan soldiers), he exactly names the sort of detail which, from photographer to photographer, surprises: ""one boy's bad teeth"" in a William Klein scene of Little Italy, the dirt road in a Kertesz picture of a blind gypsy violinist (""I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my long-ago travels in Hungary and Rumania""). Other recognitions, other distinctions emerge--between ""landscapes of predilection"" (where one feels one has been, or is going) and tourist photographs; between erotica (""disturbed, fissured"") and pornography. But it is in searching back through photographs of his mother, after her death, that Barthes arrives at the essence, for him, of photography: one childhood picture, not reproducible (""It exists only for me""), but a ""just image."" Grander statements appear--to the effect, for one, that photography alone authenticates existence and foretells death--but it is the emotional experience of photographs, ordinarily the preserve of fiction, that resonates here. Readers of Susan Sontag's On Photography will find Barthes a gentler, more private, also insinuating voice on the subject. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Roland Barthes (1915-1980), a French critic and intellectual, was a seminal figure in late twentieth-century literary criticism. Barthes's primary theory is that language is not simply words, but a series of indicators of a given society's assumptions. He derived his critical method from structuralism, which studies the rules behind language, and semiotics, which analyzes culture through signs and holds that meaning results from social conventions. Barthes believed that such techniques permit the reader to participate in the work of art under study, rather than merely react to it.

Barthes's first books, Writing Degree Zero (1953), and Mythologies (1957), introduced his ideas to a European audience. During the 1960s his work began to appear in the United States in translation and became a strong influence on a generation of American literary critics and theorists.

Other important works by Barthes are Elements of Semiology (1968), Critical Essays (1972), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), and The Empire of Signs (1982). The Barthes Reader (1983), edited by Susan Sontag, contains a wide selection of the critic's work in English translation.

(Bowker Author Biography)