The book marks the fortieth anniversary of Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. Odette England invited more than two hundred artists, writers and critics to respond to the treasured snapshot Barthes discusses at length in that text but never reproduces: an image of his mother Henriette, aged five, made in 1898, known as the Winter Garden photograph. It is one of the most famous unseen pictures in the world.

“With the Photograph, we enter into flat Death. The horror is this: nothing to say about the death of one whom I love most, nothing to say about her photograph, which I contemplate without ever being able to get to the heart of it, to transform it. The only thought I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting.” — Roland Barthes