100 Books Like Camera Lucida

On Photography is Sontag’s attempt to develop the thought of Barthes, Benjamin, and others and apply the resultant perspective to the critical understanding of the fundamental role of photography in modern life. The book is constructed as a series of interconnected essays, each of which explores the moral and dialectical character of photographic interventions. Photography embodies the moral ambiguity of human activity: the camera claims to deliver truth but is essentially selective and partial; photography reveals and conceals the real; the photograph is an artificial mode of representation but claims to provide a `picture’ of life that can only be captured through the camera.

This ambiguous ontology of the image impacts upon both the act of image-making and the interpretive task of reading and understanding the image. With modern photography the viewer is constituted in a dual movement of separation (and alienation) and connectivity (and communality). Photographic engagement constitutes, so… show more.

Not much in common between Gombrich and Berger, ideologically—so I would presume. Yet Berger’s social history of Western art, woven into the rise of capitalism, advertising, and mass media, is similarly direct in style.

It irritates me; it’s supposed to irritate. Given its radical energy, the book seems surprisingly undated. First published in 1972, it also still seems adventurous in design—the art book as a work of art.

I turn to Mrs. Ramsay, the wife, mother, and hostess of this book, whenever I question my value in the world. By Victorian standards, she “has it all”: a doting (if difficult) husband, eight loving children (with whom, amazingly, she seems to have no problems), and a comfortable way of life. She alone, not her renowned philosopher spouse, not the young poet nor the dedicated artist who comes for a visit, brings meaning and harmony to a group of guests over one holiday weekend.

Mrs. Ramsay reminds me that nurturing and feeding (in all the meanings of that word) other people is a sacred task, even if our society doesn’t recognize it as such. Even a simple dinner party can partake of spiritual eternity: “Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.”

When I spend too much of my own day on seemingly mindless chores or… show more.

I’m drawn to books that buck expectations, whether that’s through the format, content, or approach. So I adore how this book absolutely tears them all down and creates something more original instead. Chunks of this book are written like social media posts, which create quick, digestible sections that let the absurdity, humor, and social musings really hit.

I also admire how Lockwood is able to switch so smoothly between hilarity, heartbreak, anxiety, and sadness; I was cackling one minute and then ugly crying just a few pages later. I’ve never read a book quite like this before. Lockwood’s writing style inspires me to take more risks in my own stories.

Andrew O’Hagan is a contemporary master of the literary essay, and in this book we have three long non-fiction pieces linked by his investigations into the online world. O’Hagan was the ghostwriter for Julian Assange’s doomed autobiography, and here he tells the story of this adventure – it’s a publisher’s nightmare but a dream for the psychoanalyst, as the line between Assange’s invented self and the reality of his life begins to collapse. The other two essays also explore mercurial identities online, with a portrait of the rumored, shadowy inventor of Bitcoin, and the brief life of a Frankensteinian amalgam of O’Hagan’s own making – a cyber-persona who has an address, a credit card, and who can buy drugs on the Dark Web. O’Hagan even manages to meet his creation’s mother.  

I go to Ben Lerner’s writing for the shimmering atmospheres of his fictional universes. 10:04 is set in contemporary New York City and follows the narrator-writer through his urban routines. But between his health scares, relationship worries, and professional commitments, the novel thrums with a strange, uneasy beat as the narrator questions the fabric of modern life in a large city. He feels the sublime abundance of the commodities that surround him, whose very abundance is precarious. The book meditates on the fragility of the global supply chains that bring cans of ground coffee onto supermarket shelves and into our baskets. There is also a superstorm approaching, which threatens the city’s power. Lerner is wonderful on twenty-first-century, first-world malaise.

This is the work of a cultural sage with deep wisdom to offer on how political issues affect culture, especially literature.

It illuminated to me how significant cultural artifacts of high modernity like the short story as a phenomenon, the work of Charles Baudelaire in relation to the city, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, and the stories of Franz Kafka - that I had once been uncomfortable with because of their density - mattered and needed to be engaged with to make sense of the intellectual currents of the age.

To take my place among a culturally aware Benjamin is a writer I could not sidestep.  

Crary’s work provides a theoretical and empirically informed synthesis of the work of theorists like Berger, Debord, Baudrillard, Barthes, and Sontag. Like these earlier writers, the technological transformations of visual culture are at the heart of the social transformations of the modern world. To understand modernity is thus first to make sense of its visual logics, procedures, and practices. This general argument allowed the author to enter the granular historical details of how seeing and 'observation’ have become essential to the concerns of modern life. What he calls 'techniques of the observer’ are in fact the core sensory apparatus that has helped to shape the institutions and practices of modern life.

What can be visualized is correlated to the technical affordances and historical development of representational practices. This makes technologies of the visual central to social analysis. Some of the most powerful drivers of modern life are thus linked to… show more.

In the 1940s, a young American woman named Mariana Yampolsky came to Mexico to study and never looked back. Throughout the 1960s, she wandered around the country taking shots of the rural and indigenous people she met. Her lens conveyed the poorest aspects of Mexican culture with empathy and artistry that no other photographers of the time demonstrated. Inexplicably, for all its vast and varied geography, ethnicities, and societal classes, rivaling even China in terms of its photogenic diversity, there are very few photography books on Mexico, making The Edge of Time a timeless literary benchmark.

As a photography critic for The New York Times, Grundberg was present when a generation of artists began to take apart the photographic image and transform its meaning in society. He wrote about post-modern practice in the present tense, as it was happening. This book is a collection of his reviews and essays from the 1980s when the medium was at a crossroads; the factual veracity of photography was enduring challenges at every turn and the valuation of the photograph as an art object was under critical scrutiny.