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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.

Roland Barthes

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
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 BARTHES

Known Law Limitation Photography Possible
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
ROLAND BARTHES

Notable Order Photography Sophistication Value
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES

Innocent Language One Liner
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES

Food Moral Rare Representation
Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES

Better Burn Last Myself
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
ROLAND BARTHES

Exploration Myself Photography Question Wound
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

History Invention Photography Review
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
ROLAND BARTHES

Beyond Image Meaning
The photographic image is a message without a code.
ROLAND BARTHES

Code Image Message Photography
Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
ROLAND BARTHES

Experience Fashion Past Present Refusal
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Myself Painting Reality See
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
Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fragile Soft Talk Tender Yourself
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
ROLAND BARTHES

Death Ourselves Photography Return
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fantasy Greatness Mythology Photography

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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