Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, Chapter 1
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Nice work! Through your erasure poem, you capture the general essence of Camera Lucida. By taking the very first page of the book, a page that is supposed to set the pace for the rest of the book and establish what the book will be about, and “erasing” certain words, you whittle it down to its bare bones. While reading through your poem it felt as though you were able to summarize, in decidedly fewer words than Barthes, what the premise of the book was.
One aspect of the poem I especially liked was how the last two lines repeated the same phrase. Once in a way that made grammatical sense and then again backward. The backward rephrasing of the sentence not only emphasizes the idea of desiring photography but also seems to make a statement about the book itself. The last sentence, while you understand on some level what is being said, is inherently confusing due to the way it is “written”, much like Camera Lucida itself. Much like your erasure poem’s last two lines, Camera Lucida was hard to understand at times due to its repetition of ideas and phrases and its use of language.
Interestingly, the poem works because when you take into consideration the book that the page came from, it feels as though the poem could have been written by Barthes himself. The poem follows the idea of Barthes’s discovery of Photography and his increasing fascination and interest in it. The erasure poem doesn’t change the meaning of this introduction page and instead outlines and emphasizes the meaning for readers.