It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental. Roland Barthes More Quotes by Roland Barthes More Quotes From 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 butterfly mean moving Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula. Roland Barthes mythology world knowledge When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead. Roland Barthes return photograph looks 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 photography class two I have not a desire but a need for solitude. Roland Barthes solitude desire needs Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school Roland Barthes teacher culture school [Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography. Roland Barthes delight biographies photography Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police. Roland Barthes blow class men Flaubert had infinite correction to perform. Roland Barthes corrections infinite It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus. Roland Barthes heart men moving The Text is not a definitive object. Roland Barthes objects Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them. Roland Barthes bourgeoisie keys class 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 passion mean thinking Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. Roland Barthes sweaters expression two The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' Roland Barthes accessories unity simple 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 light drama wrestling The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death. Roland Barthes photography secret winter Great portrait photographers are great mythologists. Roland Barthes portraits photographer To eat steak rare . . . represents both a nature and a morality. Roland Barthes steak morality pregnancy This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival. Roland Barthes unfaithful survival absence
