It seems in Latin ‘photograph’ would be said ‘imago lucis opera expressa’; which is to say: image revealed, ‘extracted’, ‘mounted’, ‘expressed’ (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light. And if photography belonged to a world with some residual sensitivity to myth, we should exult over the richness of the symbol:the loved body is immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal, silver (monument and luxury); to which we might add the notion that this metal. like all of the metals of Alchemy is alive.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 81
