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Photography Quotes by Roland Barthes

46 Photography quotes by Roland Barthes

All Photography quotes Roland Barthes’s page

A photograph can feel like a magic echo of a past moment, not just a simple copy. Barthes notes that to truly see an image you often need to look away or close your eyes, letting its power work beneath the surface. He also points out that photos can become political testimony, sometimes speaking too loudly for editors.

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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

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The necessary condition for an image is sight,

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Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

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The photographic image... is a message without a code.

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“The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...”

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Every photograph is a certificate of presence.

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

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A picture is never anything but its own plural description.

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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…

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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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What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

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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…

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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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Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living…

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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,…

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“I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards…

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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…

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I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from…

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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…

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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…

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Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close…

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“What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell…

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One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates,…

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“[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain…

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“Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it…

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For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere;…

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“A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual…

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The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it…

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The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse)…

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One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized…

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“Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been…

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“We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community…

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“It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them…

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The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and…

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When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move;…

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Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the…

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For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic…

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The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic)…

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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…

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A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual…

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More by Roland Barthes

“Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done…

The Text is not a definitive object.

“Valéry used to speak of those people who die in an accident because they are unwilling to let go of their umbrellas; how many…

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The…

“A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

“Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated…

“It is said that Time soothes mourning – No, Time makes nothing happen; it merely makes the emotivity of mourning pass.”

“So long as I perceive the world as hostile, I remain linked to it: *I am not crazy*. But sometimes, once my bad temper…

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived…

“(Sartre) (The world is full without me, as in Nausea; the world plays at living behind a glass partition; the world is in an…

“Like love, mourning affects the world—and the worldly—with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from…

Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

“There is an age at which we teach what we know. Then comes another age at which we teach what we do not know;…

As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that…