Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“La chambre claire” also known in its English and Ukrainian translation as “Camera lucida” is the last book by the French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes published just several months before his death. In this essay, the author explores the medium of photography and also reflects on the death of his mother. Barthes attempts to find his mother’s “real image” in a photograph of her as a child. Through the intense grief on the loss of a loved one, Barthes transforms a cultural analysis of photography into phenomenological. According to Barthes, photography can pierce the veil of symbolic codes of language and culture, thus existing beyond the semiotics and affecting the body as much as the mind.