Tyre

Part 1: Toshi-e (Toward the City) by Yutaka Takanashi

Part 2: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

Roland Barthes wasn't a photographer. In fact, he openly admitted that he didn't want to be one. Great way to open up a review of book on photography I hear you say, but wait, because packed with this tiny little volume Barthes eloquently sets out how he relates to the photographs he encounters as a member of the audience.

The book is split into two parts. The second part, which I personally didn't find that interesting, is where Barthes takes us through his journey through photography to find the photograph that most looks like his deceased mother. Not the one with the best likeness, but the one that captures who she was as a person. The one that speaks of her character not simply what she looked like at one particular moment in time.

In the first part, Barthes details what he does and does not consider a true photograph, irrespective of that fact that what you hold is technically a photograph. He discusses the elements that go into a photograph and how those elements can be overused so that they become pointless, and talks about the use of a 2D image to represent the 3D world and whether it can ever be successful.

The most value in the book for me, however, were the parts where Barthes describes his thoughts behind the terms punctum and stadium, which are similar in intent to Cartier-Bresson's oft-repeated "decisive moment". He leads us up through his development of these terms and then shows some photographs to illustrate his punctum in those photographs.

Camera Lucida is a short book coming in at 119 pages, which is a good thing at times because Barthes' somewhat idiosyncratic writing can take some time to wrap your head around. But once you unravel his sentences and the ideas he is putting forward, this is a book you'll come back to many times.

Part 3: Visions of Japan by Shomei Tomatsu