Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
Roland BarthesRead
For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the distinction between reality and representation in photography, suggesting that photos can create a misleading sense of life through their depiction of past moments.
Roland Barthes contemplates the complex relationship between photography and reality. He argues that while a photograph captures a moment that once was real, it inherently carries a paradox: it suggests life and motion, yet the act of capturing it freezes that moment in time, effectively rendering it lifeless. This tension results from our desire to assign a greater worth to reality, as we conflate the real with a sense of vitality, only to realize that the photograph represents a past that cannot be revived, thus implying that the moment is already gone and dead.
Themes
PhotographyRealityLifeTimeRepresentation
In practice
Example use cases
In a gallery talk about the meaning of photography in contemporary art.
More from Roland Barthes
All quotes →If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
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The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other.
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The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
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I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.
Roland BarthesRead
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
Roland BarthesRead
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