There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
ROLAND BARTHESWhat the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
More Roland Barthes Quotes
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Literature is the question minus the answer.
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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.
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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Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.
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Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or “filiation”), the Text is without a source – the “author” a mere “guest” at the reading of the Text.
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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.
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We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
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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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Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
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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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
ROLAND BARTHES -
I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.
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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
ROLAND BARTHES -
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
ROLAND BARTHES -
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 -
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 -
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
ROLAND BARTHES -
Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.
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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
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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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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.
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Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
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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