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July 14, 2010
Geoffrey Batchen, ed. Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's "Camera Lucida" Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 320 pp.; 5 b/w ills. Cloth $29.95 (97802620135253)
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Photography, Roland Barthes argued, is most potent when considered through the lens of death. Or as Geoffrey Batchen’s new edited collection suggests, photography is most potent when considered through the lens of Roland Barthes’s death. As this elegant volume makes evident, contemporary photography studies is simultaneously enervated by Barthes’s continuing, towering presence and yet not ready to let him go. Such is the interminable work of mourning. As the title implies, Photography Degree Zero: Reflections...