Lucida book5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() This could be a painting, or a photograph, or a mental image that we create within ourselves. It needs some kind of analogon – an equivalent of perception – to work. Sartre also notes that imagination is a fundamental human freedom. Imagination is essential to our humanity, and it breaks us free of our past, allowing us to do new things. Imagination can be anything – a synthesis of past experience, past perceptions, our disciplines and so forth. When we are conscious, we are conscious of something, and our consciousness can distinguish between what is imagined and what is perceived. Perception is about what is in front of us, reflecting a particular subject (and thus its ‘existential’ truths). Sartre makes clear the distinction between perception and imagination. In fact his work contains a surprising paucity of reference to other research.īarthes notes that an image could be considered from three angles – the subject of the photograph, the viewer of the photograph, and the photographer him or her self. But he only views it from the perspective of the first two of these three.Ī clue to his approach is on the first page – In Homage to L’Imaginaire by Jean-Paul Sartre (1940). It has become a classic text on the subject – yet Barthes was not a photographer, and had little time for colour images or ‘clever theories’ from the photographer’s perspective (such as Cartier-Bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment’). Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes, is an odd book. ![]()
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