We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
ROLAND BARTHESUltimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
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In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
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I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die.
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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
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Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
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The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
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The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
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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.
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Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.
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I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
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One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
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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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A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.
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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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The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
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Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
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I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
ROLAND BARTHES