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| Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot Portrait of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre 1844 daguerreotype George Eastman House Rochester, New York |
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| L. Wright Train-wreck on the Providence Worcester Railroad near Pawtucket, Rhode Island 1853 daguerreotype George Eastman House, Rochester, New York |
"On Saturday 23 February, he taught his eleventh class of the year and had lunch with his group in the Chinese restaurant. He went for a walk in Montmartre in the afternoon. He had dinner at the home of Youssef Baccouche and dropped into a party organized by François Flahault. On Sunday, he went to the market in the morning, spent part of the day reading theses and then went to Orly Airport to meet Michel Salzedo who was just back from Tel Aviv. He took him to Bofinger's and a few friends joined them. On Monday 25 February, he got up late. He typed the text on Stendhal before going to the lunch in the rue des Blancs-Manteaux. That afternoon, he was knocked down by a van in the rue des Écoles."
"It was a 'cold, yellow' day he had noted in his desk diary before leaving. He survived for another month. He received visits, but he could no longer relate to anyone. He did nothing, wrote nothing. He died on 26 March 1980, at 1:40 p.m., in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital."
– closing sentences of Tiphaine Samoyault's large authoritative new biography of Roland Barthes, profoundest of all twentieth-century writers on the vexed subject of photography. The original French edition was nominated for the Prix Goncourt in 2015 – now translated by Andrew Brown and published by Polity as Barthes: a biography.
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| Southworth & Hawes Portrait of a Woman in Nine Oval Views ca. 1845-61 daguerreotype Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Southworth & Hawes Portrait of Rollin Heber Neal ca. 1845-61 daguerreotype George Eastman House Rochester, New York |
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| David Octavius Hill Mrs Bell of Madras ca. 1849 daguerreotype Cincinnati Art Museum |
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| Auguste Vacquerie The hand of Madame Hugo 1853-54 salted paper print George Eastman House, Rochester, New York |
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| Louis-Rémy Robert Tree study at Saint Cloud 1851 salted paper print Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Charles Nègre Women in Courtyard ca. 1847-57 salted paper print Cantor Center, Stanford University |
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| Benjamin Brecknell Turner Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire - North Transept ca. 1854 albumen print Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Charles Marville Hôtel de Ville, Paris ca. 1865-75 albumen print George Eastman House, Rochester, New York |
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| Delmaet & Durandelle Sculptor Amié Millet with full-size plaster model of Apollo statue-group for roof of Paris Opéra 1868-69 albumen print George Eastman House, Rochester, New York |
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| Édouard Baldus Cloister, St Trophime, Arles - North Gallery ca. 1855-65 albumen print George Eastman House Rochester, New York |
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| Julia Margaret Cameron Ophelia Study, No. 2 1867 albumen print George Eastman House, Rochester, New York |
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| Mathew Brady Edwin Booth and his daughter Edwina ca. 1863-65 albumen print George Eastman House, Rochester, New York |
"I am only the imaginary contemporary of my own present; contemporary of its languages, its utopias, its systems (i.e., of its fictions), in short, of its mythology or of its philosophy, but not of its history, of which I inhabit only the shimmering reflection: the phantasmagoria."
– from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (1977)