Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, and semiotician who worked mainly on the signs of everyday Western popular culture. He is best known for Mythologies, a 1957 collection of essays on the myths of modern life, and for Camera Lucida, his reflections on photography and the single detail that pierces a viewer. His academic career was tied to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the Collège de France, and he died in 1980.
