..the great portrait photographers are great mythologists.
- Roland Barthes
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Nothing would be funnier (if one were not its passive victim, its plastron, as sade would say) than the photographers’ contortions to produce effects that are "lifelike".
- Roland Barthes
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All 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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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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"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
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Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
- 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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The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its object: dualities we can conceive but not perceive... Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.
- Roland Barthes
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What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training... it is studium... whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions. The second element will break, or punctuate, the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out... it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument... punctum.
- Roland Barthes
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A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
- Roland Barthes
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. . . observing that many of the men photographed by Nadar have long fingernails: an ethnographical question: how long were nails worn in a certain period?
- Roland Barthes -
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Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.
- Roland Barthes
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...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.
- Roland Barthes -
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The photographic image... is a message without a code.
- Roland Barthes -
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