I like photography. I like taking pictures, editing them, cataloguing, evaluating and labeling. Yet I have never paused to think what is the nature of photography, and how it relates to other things. So when my daughter gave me Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes I took the opportunity to step up to a new level. And while this is what happened in the end, the whole experience left me puzzled and uncertain.
I read the book on a long flight - it is fairly short and it consists of about forty vignettes comprising two parts of the book. The writing style is peculiar, I was annoyed with the sentence structure, abundance of quotes and references, prolific use of latin, italicized words and more. All along I had the impression that the book represents a trip that my mind does not want to take, yet I glided from one sentence to another with relative ease. The main feature of the book is that while I understood most of the words, I hardly understood any of the sentences. After finishing the book, I have glanced at randomly selected phrases and I could not honestly say that I could parse them unambiguously . One would think at this point that this could not have been a positive experience. Au contraire, and here is why and how.
The subject of the book is of course photography and it takes it from the first principles. There is no doubt that the author knows what he is talking about, although a reader like myself cannot grasp the meaning at some level. The discussion is akin to looking at a painting from a distance of one inch and establishing the language and physical evidence. The jig-saw puzzle of different bits and pieces is slowly absorbed by your mind and in end the picture emerges. I doubt if it is the same picture for every reader, and in this respect the book mimics the subject itself. This type of thing is common when watching someone paint or draw, listening to the music, reading poetry or watching a movie that was edited in a fancy way. However, I have never seen it, or even thought possible, in a scholarly work.
I read the book on a long flight - it is fairly short and it consists of about forty vignettes comprising two parts of the book. The writing style is peculiar, I was annoyed with the sentence structure, abundance of quotes and references, prolific use of latin, italicized words and more. All along I had the impression that the book represents a trip that my mind does not want to take, yet I glided from one sentence to another with relative ease. The main feature of the book is that while I understood most of the words, I hardly understood any of the sentences. After finishing the book, I have glanced at randomly selected phrases and I could not honestly say that I could parse them unambiguously . One would think at this point that this could not have been a positive experience. Au contraire, and here is why and how.
The subject of the book is of course photography and it takes it from the first principles. There is no doubt that the author knows what he is talking about, although a reader like myself cannot grasp the meaning at some level. The discussion is akin to looking at a painting from a distance of one inch and establishing the language and physical evidence. The jig-saw puzzle of different bits and pieces is slowly absorbed by your mind and in end the picture emerges. I doubt if it is the same picture for every reader, and in this respect the book mimics the subject itself. This type of thing is common when watching someone paint or draw, listening to the music, reading poetry or watching a movie that was edited in a fancy way. However, I have never seen it, or even thought possible, in a scholarly work.
No comments:
Post a Comment