Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Photography
Initials
Soon
Photographs
Value
Sophisticated
Acme
Becomes
Familiar
Decrees
Whatever
Period
Reversal
Values
Photograph
Decree
Order
Surprise
Initial
Anything
Periods
Notable
More quotes by Roland Barthes
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
Roland Barthes
When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
Roland Barthes
Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.
Roland Barthes
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.
Roland Barthes
The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.
Roland Barthes
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Roland Barthes
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: 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
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
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
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
The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
Roland Barthes
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
Roland Barthes
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Roland Barthes
As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.
Roland Barthes
The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
Roland Barthes
Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.
Roland Barthes
The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!
Roland Barthes
I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis for centuries this was a great mythic theme.
Roland Barthes
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
We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.
Roland Barthes