The reason I’m writing about Roland Barthes on DPReview is that Barthes was fascinated by photography, and wrote one of my all-time favorite books about it - ‘Camera Lucida', published in 1980. Reading the work of certain semiologists is like trying to argue with a hungry 3-year old who has an MA. That joke (and variations on it) are, trust me, the only funny thing that has ever come out of semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstructionism. When the king of the deconstructionists Jacques Derrida (of whose work ‘abstruse’ would count as a highly charitable description) passed away in 2004, satirical website The Onion ran a single sentence headline: ' Jacques Derrida “dies” '. For obvious reasons, academic texts that deal with semiotics (and structuralism, and post-structuralism, and deconstructivism) tend towards the abstruse. It was as a semiologist that Barthes (b 1915 - d 1980) was best known, and in simple terms, semiotics is the study of signs, symbols and their meaning. If you’ve never heard of Roland Barthes, congrats - clearly you were never forced to study structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism or semiotics.
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