The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.
ROLAND BARTHESI am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
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Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.
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Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
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I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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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.
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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
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Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
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Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
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It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
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Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
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I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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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.
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Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
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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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The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
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Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
ROLAND BARTHES