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I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

Roland Barthes

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
ROLAND BARTHES

Confession Inflexion Lying
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
ROLAND BARTHES

Interesting Language Myself Seduce Wound
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES

Innocent Language One Liner
I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fun Life Myself Possible Pretty Professional
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fantasy Greatness Mythology Photography
The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Evil Forgiveness God Ourselves Suffering Weakness
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.
ROLAND BARTHES

Beginning Known Love Myself Writing
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Myself Painting Reality See
What love lays bare in me is energy.
ROLAND BARTHES

Bare Energy Love One Liner
Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or “filiation”), the Text is without a source – the “author” a mere “guest” at the reading of the Text.
ROLAND BARTHES

Reading Source Text Understand Work
To eat, to speak, to sing (need we add: to kiss?) are operations which have the same site of the body for origin.
ROLAND BARTHES

Body Eat Origin Sing Talk
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Certificate Photograph Presence
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fear Photography Scare Thinking
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
ROLAND BARTHES

Excession Language Love Try Writing
A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES

Emotion Light Reserve Shadow
New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.
ROLAND BARTHES

Abstraction Desert Height Man Reality

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

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I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

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Popular Authors

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