Camera Lucida

Featured photo by Koen Wessing, from 1979, taken in Nicaragua, first seen it on Camera Lucida

It’s been a while! I find myself often having to write that. I am very bad at keeping up with projects that are solely my own.

And usually, this is the part where I try to put pen to paper on what motivates me to be different this time. Well, this time it will actually be different. At least in the sense that I’m not making any promises or trying to motivate myself.

I’m going to do things at my pace and hopefully, by August, I’ll have everything on the website taken care of.

This post is a reminder to get back on a project that I absolutely loved and that I believe has great use – both in terms of the process itself and for further usage.

In my first year at the Portuguese Institute of Photography, I was tasked with reading Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes, for the History of Photography subject. And while I loved the book in its own right, the experience was greatly enhanced by looking for the photos that were mentioned and looking into the photographers, and all the references that people who are reading Camera Lucida may not know – Wessing’s photo was an example of that at the time.

I still have the text, which needs a lot of work, and I’ll compile the photos to create something more interactive that is easier to use. Eventually. But the short-term goal is just to at least post it here and have a working version of that research.