{"author":"Roland Barthes","author_id":"Roland+Barthes","total_quotes":76,"quotes":[{"text":"Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumes as such, publicly.","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["photography","public-private"],"id":682,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"},{"text":"Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["literary-theory","literature","roland-barthes"],"id":8153,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"},{"text":"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 gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. From this gesture derive all photographs whose principle (or better whose alibi) is “shock”; for the photographic “shock” consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it.","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["photography"],"id":10627,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"},{"text":"I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one).","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["french-history","morbidity","photography"],"id":14046,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"},{"text":"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 photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer's art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not (I)not(I) photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object (how could Kerész have 'separated' the dirt road from the violinist walking on it?). The Photographer's 'second sight' does not consist in 'seeing' but in being there. And above all, imitating Orpheus, he must not turn back to look at what he is leading — what hi is giving to me!","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["47","looking","photography"],"id":36855,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"},{"text":"[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.","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["culture","knowledge","photography"],"id":38925,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"},{"text":"Today, information: pulverized, nonhierarchized, dealing with everything: nothing is protected from information and at the same time nothing is open to reflection -\u003e Encyclopedias are impossible -\u003e I would say: the more information grows, the more knowledge retreats and therefore the more decision is partial (terroristic, dogmatic) -\u003e “I don’t know,” “I refuse to judge”: as scandalous as an agrammatical sentence: doesn’t belong to the language of the discourse. Variations on the “I don’t know.” The obligation to “be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . .","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["information","language"],"id":38944,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"},{"text":"Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["death","grief","loss","mourning","suffering"],"id":45768,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"},{"text":"It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["photography","studium"],"id":51026,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"},{"text":"If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.","author":"Roland Barthes","tags":["god","language","understanding"],"id":55519,"author_id":"Roland+Barthes"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":76,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}