Barthes on Photography and Memory

“Every exploration is an appropriation.”
― Roland Barthes, The 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 Barthes, Camera 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 Barthes, Camera 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 Barthes, Camera 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 Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

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

Snippets from Long Life Cool white

"Roberta Smith, writing in the New York Times, has aptly characterized trends in image making (very large, staged color photographs) as the "Pre-Raphaelite painting of our day." The problem, to state it baldly, is one of stilt coupled with bloat. Absent from these oversized tableaux is the inherently surrealist, contingent, "found" quality of the vernacular photograph, the quality my quartet of writers so eloquently identifies and holds so dear. My goal is to reclaim this critical history of ideas in relation to contemporary photographs, and to understand how the notion of the accident might be relevant." -Moyra Davey, from, Long Life Cool White, P. 81

Quotes from In Platos Cave

I have felt compelled to re-read On Photography. It has been over 20 years since I first read this book. On Photography, Susan Sontag, Delta Books, NY, 1973

Quotes from the essay, In Plato's Cave

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and,therefore like power. P. 4

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus photography developed in tandem with one of the most charecteristic of modern activities: tourism. P.9

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an apprearance of participation. P. 10

Eventually, people might learn to act out more their aggression with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. P. 15

Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. P. 23