"What, then, was Barthes looking for when he looked at photographs? In the first half of the book, he elaborates a distinction between two planes of the image. The first, which he calls the studium, is the manifest subject, meaning and context of the photograph: everything that belongs to history, culture, even to art. "The studium is a kind of education," he writes. It's here that we learn, say, about Moscow in a William Klein street photograph from 1959, or about the comportment of a well-dressed African-American family in a 1926 picture by James Van Der Zee. But it's the second category that really skewers Barthes's sensibility. He calls it the punctum: that aspect (often a detail) of a photograph that holds our gaze without condescending to mere meaning or beauty. In the same Van Der Zee photograph, the punctum is one woman's strapped pumps, though it later shifts, as the image "works" on the author, to her gold necklace. This is one of a few curious moments in the book where Barthes blatantly misreads the image at hand; the woman is actually wearing a string of pearls. But his point survives: he has been indelibly touched by the poignant detail."

"(...)artists such as Gerhard Richter, Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean and Fiona Tan have all amassed archives of everyday portraits that owe much of their allure to Barthes's "imperious sign of my future death". In fiction, WG Sebald admitted a profound debt to Camera Lucida; in Austerlitz, the protagonist's search for an image of his lost mother is clearly modelled on Barthes's desire for a glimpse of "the unique being"."

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading