"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 incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
~ Roland Barthes ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
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.
"The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language tr...
"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language tr...
"I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voic...
"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...