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The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Roland Barthes

Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Certificate Photograph Presence
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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Invisible Photograph See
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
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Exploration Myself Photography Question Wound
Literature is the question minus the answer.
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Answer Literature Question
The photographic image is a message without a code.
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Code Image Message Photography
It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.
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Emotional Sexuality
The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
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Fashion Time Value
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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Classification Forget Language Oppression Power Speech
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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Death Ourselves Photography Return
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
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Attend People Performance Spectacle Sports Thinking
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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Existence Law Natural Object Silence Society State
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Children Death Fear Mom Myself Patient Photography
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Desire Disappointment Pleasure Rival Truth
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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Fragile Soft Talk Tender Yourself
To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought?
ROLAND BARTHES

Answer Hope Love Myself Question Yourself
A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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Description Photograph Plural
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
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Age Experience Old Specific Vision
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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History Invention Photography Review
Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.
ROLAND BARTHES

I Love You Language Lose Myself Point
Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.
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Essence Hell Heroes High Place
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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Forget Ourselves Settle
Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
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Community Family Instrument Television
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
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I Love You Myself Removal
Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
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Construction Front Physical Symbolic
The book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
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Creation Life Meaning
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
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Myself Painting Reality See
The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
ROLAND BARTHES

Forget Lover Memories Strain Time

The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

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The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

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