Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
ROLAND BARTHESA 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.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.
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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
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The realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
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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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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
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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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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
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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.
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Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
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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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The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
ROLAND BARTHES






