Camera Lucida exposes Barthes' journey to the core of photography. He suggests two characteristics, which could be applied to any photograph: "studium" (broad interest) or "punctum" (personal fascination) and discusses how the concept of Death can be applied to photography in general.

Barthes discusses how he cannot recognize his mother on her photographs as a child and as a young woman, that almost none of her photographs can translate what and who she had been. It raises the question of possibility of reaching the idea, the personality, the core of dead ancestors, is it possible for people who have not met them at all? But it also shows how loose can be the memory about someone. Barthes refuses to show the one photograph of his mother as a child, which corresponds to his memories and feeling about her; how this hiding is working? Is it possible to hide anything in the age of internet and access to everything? How this hiding affects readers' imagination? And why was it important, if the photograph that he describes would be differently perceived by each reader, because of the "punctum"?

Barthes mentions Death a lot: how Death is depicted on photographs; how photography embodies Death and at the same time exists as a confirmation of someone's or something's existence; how film/plate photograph was physically present in the same space as someone/something depicted. This book also touches the idea of the truth (photographic truth in particular) and can lead to questions of differences between film and digital photography.

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