This note on photography, written by Roland Barthes a few months before his death, is his most penetrating text. Photography, “a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false at the level of perception, true at the level of time”, is scrutinised through Barthes’s own most intimate experience, that of the photographs of his mother, in a reflection that moves between the studium, the general cultural interest an image can arouse, and the punctum, the detail that wounds and pierces the viewer. The last, and most penetrating, text by Roland Barthes.