"If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole times I remain with it? I look at it, I scrutinize it, ...
The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...
~ Roland Barthes ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)...
More Roland Barthes quotes
"Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is...
"A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
"Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photog...
"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...
"Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into t...
"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...
"Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the ...
"I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole in the camera), and that this gestur...
"One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everythi...
"[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 mi...
"Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, ...
"The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity' of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The sub...
"...The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész'a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images 'spoke too much...
"I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with ...