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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

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
Great
Photographers
Portrait
Portraits
Photographer

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
Roland Barthes
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There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
Roland Barthes
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Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?
Roland Barthes
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The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!
Roland Barthes
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I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland Barthes
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Le langage est une peau: je frotte mon langage contre l'autre. Language is a skin I rub my language against another language.
Roland Barthes
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Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
Roland Barthes
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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.
Roland Barthes
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All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
Roland Barthes
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland Barthes
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A light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.
Roland Barthes
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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
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I want to be both pathetic and admirable, I want to be at the same time a child and an adult. Thereby I gamble, I take a risk: for it is always possible that the other will simply ask no question whatever about these unaccustomed glasses that the other will see, in the fact, no sign.
Roland Barthes
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Literature can no longer be either Mimesis or Mathesis but merely Semiosis, the adventure of what is impossible to language, in a word: Text (it is wrong to say that the notion of 'text' repeats the notion of 'literature': literature represents a finite world, the text figures the infinite of language).
Roland Barthes
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To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.
Roland Barthes
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What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
Roland Barthes
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What love lays bare in me is energy.
Roland Barthes
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One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
Roland Barthes