What is it that will be done away with, along with this photograph which yellows, fades, and will some day be thrown out, if not by me,... when I die? Not only "life" (this was alive, this posed in front of the lens), but also, sometimes - how to put it? - love. In front of a the only photograph in which I find my mother and father together, this couple who I know loved each other, I realise: it is love-as-treasure which is going to disappear forever, for once I am gone, no one will any longer be able to testify to this: nothing will remain but an indifferent Nature. This is a laceration so intense, so intolerable...

-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p94.