Showing posts with label Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Show all posts

Friday, November 30, 2012

Barthes on Photography and Memory

“Every exploration is an appropriation.”
― 
Roland BarthesThe Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies


“Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).”
― 
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography


“The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared, hallucination (on the one hand 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'): a mad image, chafed by reality.” 
 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“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 BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography


“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 BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography


“What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”
― 
Roland BarthesCamera Lucida: Reflections on Photography


http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/13084.Roland_Barthes?auto_login_attempted=true