Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

This personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume—and the last book Barthes published—finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography. To this end, several black-and-white photos (by the likes of Avedon, Clifford, Hine, Mapplethorpe, Nadar, Van Der Zee, and so forth) are reprinted throughout the text.

Anatole Broyard

A considerable part of ''Camera Lucida'' is a semiotic dithyramb, if you can imagine such a thing, on the subject of Mr. Barthes's deceased mother....in ''Camera Lucida'' Mr. Barthes has photographed himself, in words, as ''thus and so,'' and has added to the serenity of the great Oriental sages an inexhaustible originality and a play of mind like the play of sunlight on a grand French boulevard. -- New York Times

Roland Barthes was born in 1915 and studied French literature and the classics at the University of Paris. After teaching French at universities in Romania and Egypt, he joined the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, where he devoted himself to research in sociology and lexicology. He was a professor at the College de France until his death in 1980.