This describes a technique in MICROSCOPY by which an image from a microscope is projected on to a sheet of paper (using what is known as a drawing tube fitted to the micrscope). Looking through the eyepieces of the microscope, one can then see both the...

A camera lucida is an optical device used as a drawing aid by artists. It was patented in 1806 by William Hyde Wollaston. There seems to be evidence that the camera lucida was actually nothing but a reinvention of a device clearly described 200 years...

“You see she looks like Madonna and child, no?” said the artist Eneas Capalbo. “No, really—it’s all about what the face inspires me to do, eh?” Mr. Capalbo, now 30, grew up in Buenos Aires and speaks with a thick accent. He was kneeling over...

In the following essay, first published in 1988, Kritzman examines the relationship between language and desire in Barthes's theory, and traces an evolution in his thinking about the subject, culminating in Camera Lucida.