This was Roland Barthes's last book, combining a selection of photographs with reflections on photography. Examining the themes of presence and absence, the relationship between photography and theatre, history and death, the book begins as an investigation into the nature of photographs. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, it becomes an exposition of his own mind.

Observer: "Roland Barthes' final book - less a critical essay than a suite of valedictory meditations - is his most beautiful, and his most painful"