I went on his talk at KUMU (Tallinn, Estonia) in September 2010.
He talked about his book in progress
What Photography Is, a book written against Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida.
http://www.jameselkins.com/#page26
I found interesting some of his ideas. Looking forward to read this book when it will be published.
extract from his book:
7. So now as I write my answer to Camera Lucida, twenty-five years too late, I
think again of the fact that so many writers take it, and in particular the
punctum, as a touchstone. Especially those who would not normally propose
such personal concepts, so detached from history and close to solipsism.
Writers who would not allow themselves to reason with such a breathtaking
absence of scholarly support. It is as if that book, perhaps the least scholarly of
the central texts of visual studies, has protected itself by shrinking away from
the glare of criticism, shriveling to a point-like punctum of its own.
Camera Lucida has no footnotes, and the English translation has no list of
sources: omissions that simultaneously declare ‘Barthes’s’ independence and
leave readers stranded on the text as on an island, with few other writers’ voices
in earshot and no escape from the peculiarities of the author’s memory. (This
book strikes a compromise in that regard. The abbreviated references in
parentheses should be enough to allow readers to navigate from this book to
the many that address Camera Lucida.)
It is clear that a full answer to Camera Lucida cannot be an academic essay
in an academic journal: two decades of scholarship have not yet produced such
an answer. The only way to reply to a book as strange as Barthes’s is to write
another even stranger.
