Brian Dillon is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The London Review of Books, The New Statesman, as well as various art magazines. His book In The Dark Room won the Irish Book Award for Non-Fiction. His lecture will discuss Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, perhaps the most influential book ever written on photography. Despite the fact that Barthes and Arbus seem to share the idea of photography as “the impossible science of the unique being,” Arbus is absent in Barthes’s text. Dillon will ask why.