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.

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.

Published two months prior to his death in 1980, Camera Lucida is Barthes's first and only book devoted to photography.

If sentimentality can be seen as a tactic in the late career of Roland Barthes, then Camera Lucida belongs to such an approach.

However, the ideas about photography in Camera Lucida are certainly prepared in essays like "The Photographic Message", "Rhetoric of the Image" (1964), and "The Third Meaning" (1971).