Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
ROLAND BARTHESHe who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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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 -
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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It must always be considered as though spoken by a character in a novel
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When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
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We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
ROLAND BARTHES -
I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.
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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
ROLAND BARTHES -
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
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I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).
ROLAND BARTHES -
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
ROLAND BARTHES -
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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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






