Part A +C Roland Barthes Camera Lucida

To be brutally honest this book always pops up on all of the reading lists and i am yet to read the entire thing from cover to cover. I have a tendency to cheat at the moment and just read the chapters i find most suiting to whatever i am interested in at the time . To quote Roland Barthes and link it correctly to whatever piece you are working on is educational gold and i feel it is only right to find the time and give Camera Lucida a thorough read, the respect it deserves . Probably a reason i haven't read it through entirely before is that without sounding to stupid in writing this I'm not the strongest of readers. I revisit chapters i have read a number of times until the information has sank well and truly in which take me longer than normal to do . Roland Barthes Camera Lucida reads disconnected to me which i find difficult but for my own personal development i should spend the time and get through it .

Many of the chapters i found captivating but in particular 5 " he who is photographed" fits lovely into my current dissertation research on the new phenomenon the "selfie". He writes "once i feel myself observed by the lens ,everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of "posing",I instantaneously make another body for myself , I transform myself in advance into an image " I found this extract really interesting because its true to date . Roland began to write Camera Lucida in 1977 when his mother died and although photography was accessible to the masses in the 70s , picture taking was still more of an event that it is now with camera phones being an extension of the majority of peoples right arms. You would think that with cameras now belonging to everybody and photography happening at every moment that we would become desensitised to its effect on us and the act of posing would be more relaxed but rest assured its not . I even think to some degree that the act of "posing" has become more extreme especially in relation to the "selfie".