Camera lucida

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See camera lucida for the artist's optical aid.

Camera Lucida (in French, La Chambre Claire) is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary critic Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes's 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.

Camera Lucida, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography, was one of the most important early academic texts of criticism and theorization on photography. Neither writer was a photographer, however, and both works have been much criticised since the 1990s.

Written after the death of his mother, the book is as much a reflection on death as it is on photography. Barthes died unexpectedly in an automobile accident soon after the publication of Camera Lucida, and many have read the book as Barthes's eulogy for himself.

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