It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
ROLAND BARTHESIn 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.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
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All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
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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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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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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.
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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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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
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He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
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I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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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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The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
ROLAND BARTHES






