Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“Camera lucida...” is a textbook study by the French philosopher Roland Barthes, dedicated to the photographic medium. This, without exaggeration, is the most famous text about photography and has not lost its relevance to this day, but, unfortunately, it has never been translated into Ukrainian.

“Camera lucida...” is the last book in Barthes’s work, published a few months before his death. This short exploration is both a study of the nature of the photographic medium and a personal reflection on the death of his mother, whose true image the author tries to find in her childhood photograph. The emotional tension with which Barthes mourns the passing of a loved one transforms the cultural analysis of photography into a phenomenological one: for Barthes, photography appears as asymbolic, extra-semiotic and capable of influencing emotions and the body, bypassing rational analysis.