Signs and Images. Writings on Art, Cinema and Photography

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy, semiological essays on mass culture, then unsettled the literary critical establishment with heretical writings on the French classics, before going on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century (Empire of Signs, S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). In 1976, the one-time structuralist 'outsider' was elected to a chair at France's pre-eminent academic institution, the College de France, choosing to style himself its Professor of Literary Semiology, though this last somewhat hedonistic and more 'subjectivist' phase of his intellectual adventure was cut short by his untimely death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since the publication in 2002 of the expanded version of his Oeuvres completes [Complete Works], edited by Eric Marty. The present collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews and other occasional journalistic pieces, all drawn from that comprehensive source, attempts to give English-speaking readers access to the most significant previously untranslated material from the various stages of Barthes's career. It is divided (not entirely scientifically) into five themed volumes entitled: Theory, Politics, Literary Criticism, Signs and Images (Art, Cinema, Photography), and Interviews. 'We live surrounded by images, steeped in them, and yet we still know hardly anything about the image, ' wrote Barthes in 1961. His explorations in the young science of semiotics examined the operation of non-linguistic signifying systems such as fashion, the visual arts, cinema and photography and all these areas are covered in this volume in writings which range from an early (1947) review of art exhibitions for a Saigon-based magazine, through examples of Barthes's film criticism (Chabrol and Techine) and his theoretical musings on the 'civilization of the image', to essays from the late 1970s on the photographers Bernard Faucon and Daniel Boudinet that in some ways foreshadow his Camera Lucida of 1979.