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The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).

Roland Barthes

The Ventoux is a god of Evil, to which sacrifices must be made. It never forgives weakness and extracts an unfair tribute of suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Evil Forgiveness God Ourselves Suffering Weakness
Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES

Better Burn Last Myself
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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Death Determination Photography Young
The photographic image is a message without a code.
ROLAND BARTHES

Code Image Message Photography
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
ROLAND BARTHES

Body Desire Life Love Myself
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
ROLAND BARTHES

Invisible Photograph See
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
ROLAND BARTHES

Mourning Myself Suffering
We can never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
ROLAND BARTHES

Body Destruction Goodness Identity Known Subject Voice 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
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
ROLAND BARTHES

Blame Guilty Myself Power
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
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
ROLAND BARTHES

Failure Obligation Reading Story
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
ROLAND BARTHES

Born Cost Death Reading
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
I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.
ROLAND BARTHES

Fun Life Myself Possible Pretty Professional
Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.
ROLAND BARTHES

Different Magic Sight Touch

The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).

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The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).

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