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How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

Roland Barthes

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.
ROLAND BARTHES

Desire Fingers Language Myself Skin Tremble Word
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
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
ROLAND BARTHES

Creation Fear God Problem Scare Slow Understand Understanding
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
What love lays bare in me is energy.
ROLAND BARTHES

Bare Energy Love One Liner
To eat steak rare represents both a nature and a morality.
ROLAND BARTHES

Food Moral Rare Representation
It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
ROLAND BARTHES

Character Consider Myself Novel
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHES

Culture Drawing Text
The photographic image is a message without a code.
ROLAND BARTHES

Code Image Message Photography
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
Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Living Myself Old Photography Sound
Why is it better to last than to burn?
ROLAND BARTHES

Better Burn Last Myself
Every photograph is a certificate of presence.
ROLAND BARTHES

Camera Certificate Photograph Presence
Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
ROLAND BARTHES

Construction Front Physical Symbolic
If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a “weakness” or an “absurdity”: it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
ROLAND BARTHES

Acknowledge Demand Depend Myself Sign Strength Strong
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
ROLAND BARTHES

Myself Painting Reality See

How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?

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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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