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As Spectator I wanted to explore photography not as a question (a theme) but as a wound.

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
Photography
Question
Wanted
Spectator
Spectators
Wound
Explore
Theme
Wounds

More quotes by Roland Barthes

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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
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In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
Roland Barthes
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Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
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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Is the scene always visual? It can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: I can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.
Roland Barthes
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I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Roland Barthes
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...language is never innocent.
Roland Barthes
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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
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Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
Roland Barthes
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To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality.
Roland Barthes
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Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.
Roland Barthes
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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
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Language is neither reactionary nor progressive it is quite simply fascist for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Roland Barthes
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Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Roland Barthes
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Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce' ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.
Roland Barthes
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The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here the duration of the transmission is insignificant the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
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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Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.
Roland Barthes
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I encounter millions of bodies in my life of these millions, I may desire some hundreds but of these hundreds, I love only one.
Roland Barthes
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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