**Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes's personal, wide-ranging, and
contemplative volume--and the last book he published--finds the author
applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the
subject of photography.
**
Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar,
Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or
culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death
and loss more acutely than any other medium.
This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the
most important books of theory on the subject, along with Susan Sontag's
On Photography.