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The next slide is a quotation by Roland Barthes about his own mother in “Camera Lucida”: “I dream about her, I do not dream her. And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin all over again.”

The visual trick may have been created by the artist’s use of a common optical viewing aid called a camera lucida.

Some think he employed a camera lucida’s lens to render sitters as accurately as possible, which makes two details surprising.

Unprompted, she tells me she’s been meaning to read “Camera Lucida,” a book on photography by the French writer Roland Barthes that I mentioned to her in passing.

At some point in the past year, I bought a used copy of “Camera Lucida.”