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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland Barthes
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Roland Barthes
Age: 64 †
Born: 1915
Born: November 12
Died: 1980
Died: March 25
Diarist
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Literary Theorist
Mythographer
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Roland Gérard Barthes
Always
Invisible
Photograph
Photography
More quotes by Roland Barthes
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Roland Barthes
L'amoureux qui n'oublie pas quelquefois meurt par exce' s, fatigue et tension de me moire (tel Werther). The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
Roland Barthes
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
Roland Barthes
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
Roland Barthes
The Text is not a definitive object.
Roland Barthes
Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Roland Barthes
Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.
Roland Barthes
Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.
Roland Barthes
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
Roland Barthes
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
For the theatre one needs long arms it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
Roland Barthes
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Roland Barthes
Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
Roland Barthes
To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
Roland Barthes
The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
Roland Barthes
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Roland Barthes
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
Roland Barthes
Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.
Roland Barthes
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
Why is it better to last than to burn?
Roland Barthes
