Roland Barthes's short book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography is one of the most influential books about the photographic experience.The concepts introduced by Barthes, such as studium and punctum have become part of the standard vocabulary of photographic debate, whilst his understanding of photographic time and photography's relationship to death and a certain narcissistic way of speaking have become very influential.

In his earlier writings on photography, such as The Photographic Message, Barthes had argued that the photographic image was a message without a code. By this he meant that a photograph appears to have no form of its own; we automatically look through the surface of a photograph to see what it is of.

Other types of images, such as drawings or the cinema combine a denoted message (its analogical content, the thing the drawing depicts) and a connoted message (its style of representation plus the manner in the society communicates what it thinks of it, or symbolic meanings).

In a photograph Barthes argues the two qualities --denotation and connotation--- are inseparable; the photograph appears as the being exclusively constituted by a denoted message, thereby making the photograph both natural and cultural.

Though Barthes is primarily concerned with press photography or photojournalism he ignores the way that he photographer constructs the context and image to which their photograph represents.