In contemporary writing on photography, there is probably no text whose value and importance is as taken for granted as Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. So great is its reach and influence that it is cited approvingly both in popular non-academic books on photography and in the densest of critical works, as well as enjoying a privileged position in writing on mourning and memory, where the author's grief over his mother's death has found many admirers and imitators. It is slightly odd to find Barthes, the scourge of all doxa, so universally appreciated. It is also easy to forget that this was by no means always the case. Although it made a full recovery, Camera Lucida was initially greeted by a flurry of detractors from a politicised segment of AngloAmerican photography theorists who excoriated the book for its ontological essentialism, or lamented its sentimentality and apparent humanist deviation. (1) Indeed, the force of the reaction it originally elicited gives a good sense of the challenge that it posed to thinking on the photographic. Once a necessary shock to the orthodoxies of semiotic or historicist analysis of photography, it has now become so orthodox that its inclusion, extracted, in anthologies, is inevitable, and it is even considered hors categorie, as, for instance, in The Photography Reader, where it takes pride of place as the inaugurating piece, out of chronological order. (2)
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