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Camera Lucida (Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series)

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Camera Lucida was Roland Barthes’s last book. It is ostensibly an attempt to describe the nature of photography, and this aim is addressed in the work. The work is also, however, an evocation of Barthes’s love and grief for his mother, Henriette Barthes, who had died in 1978, shortly before Camera Lucida was written.

Barthes had lived his entire life with his mother, and his grief at her death was enormous. His examination of photography in Camera Lucida is inextricably linked with his attempt to remember his mother by looking...

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