This personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volumeand the last book Barthes publishedfinds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography. To this end, several black-and-white photos (by the likes of Avedon, Clifford, Hine, Mapplethorpe, Nadar, Van Der Zee, and so forth) are reprinted throughout the text.Anatole BroyardA considerable part of ''Camera Lucida'' is a semiotic dithyramb, if you can imagine such a thing, on the subject of Mr. Barthes's deceased mother....in ''Camera Lucida'' Mr. Barthes has photographed himself, in words, as ''thus and so,'' and has added to the serenity of the great Oriental sages an inexhaustible originality and a play of mind like the play of sunlight on a grand French boulevard. -- New York Times