Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (, ) is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes' late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the "spectrum").
In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. The book develops the twin concepts of studium and punctum: studium denoting the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, punctum denoting the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it. The book is illustrated by 25 photographs, old and contemporary, chosen by the author. Among them are the works of famous photographers such as William Klein, Robert Mapplethorpe and Nadar, in addition to a photograph from Barthes' private collection. Nevertheless, it was by no means Barthes's earliest approach to the subject. Barthes mentions photography in one of his 'little mythologies'—articles published in the journal Les Lettres Nouvelles starting in 1954, and gathered in Mythologies, published in 1957 (and in English translation in 1972). The article "Photography and Electoral Appeal" is more obviously political than Camera Lucida.
In the 1960s and entering the next decade, Barthes's analysis of photography develops more detail and insight through a structuralist approach; the treatment of photography in Mythologies is by comparison tangential and simple. There is still in this structural phase a strong political impulse and background to his theorizing of photography; Barthes connects photography's ability to represent without style (a 'perfect analogon': "The Photographic Message", 1961) to its tendency to naturalise what are in fact invented and highly structured meanings. His examples deal with press photographs and advertising, which make good use of this property (or bad use of it, as the case may be). Barthes died after being struck by a laundry van soon after the publication of Camera Lucida, and many have read the book as Barthes' eulogy for himself.
Influence
Camera Lucida has been widely read and cited in discussions of photography. Writing in 2009, Geoffrey Batchen described it as "perhaps the most influential book yet written about the photographic experience" and noted that it is "surely the most quoted book in the photographic canon," introducing terms such as studium and punctum into the vocabulary of photographic discourse. The book had gone through eighteen printings by 1996, and its vocabulary and allusive style have been noted as influential in photographic writing.