Roland Barthes and Photography

Abstract

This is a review article and a short exegesis from one of the most important texts of international commentators, especially those not yet translated into Portuguese, that we may consider the last work in Barthes’s life, Camara Lucida. What is proposed here is to offer subsidies to elucidate this important work, which, thirty years after its formation, it hasn’t been so much studied, and its huge contribution to science communication got lost, and especially the reflections on the role of photographic image in the contemporary world. It’s possible to make some hypothesis that, being a semioclasta, rather than an iconoclast, Barthes was in a better position to read and understand images.