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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.

Roland Barthes

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Education School
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
ROLAND BARTHES

Invisible Photograph See
Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
ROLAND BARTHES

Architecture Convenience Dreams Function Instrument
Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
ROLAND BARTHES

Different Magic Sight Touch
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Myself Suffering
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
ROLAND BARTHES

Age Experience Old Specific Vision
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHES

Culture Drawing Text
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
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
ROLAND BARTHES

Author Beginning Death Deep Writing
A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
ROLAND BARTHES

Description Photograph Plural
Literature is the question minus the answer.
ROLAND BARTHES

Answer Literature Question
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?
ROLAND BARTHES

Beyond Image Meaning
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Beyond Death Myself Pass Reality Spectacle
Language is never innocent.
ROLAND BARTHES

Innocent Language One Liner
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Ideas Institution Meaning Official Popular Repeat Structure
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Certificate Photograph Presence

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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