A Quote by Roland Barthes

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

Roland Barthes

Quote Topics

Ariadne Because Call Death Discover Drew Evidence Had Help Help Me Love Love And Death Me Monster Must Photograph Photography Pleasure Relation Secret Tell Thing Thread Toward Treasure Understood Viewpoint Which Winter Would

Quote Author

Roland Barthes
French - Critic
November 12, 1915 - March 26, 1980

It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It's important that I take them. There were periods where I didn't have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: 'Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.' I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: 'Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,' I would have refused.

Josef Koudelka

I collect art on a very modest scale. Most of what I have is photography because I just love it and it makes me happy and it looks good in my home. I also have a pretty big collection of art books mainly, again, on photography. A lot of photography monographs, which is great because with photography, the art itself can be reproduced quite well in book form.

Chris Parnell

I love photography - I fell in love with photography, I think, because it was my own thing, it wasn't something I needed other people's permission to do. So, it was really freeing for me actually to be able to not be a famous person and just to take pictures.

Amanda de Cadenet

I think that the exactitude of the photograph has a sort of compelling nature based in its power to duplicate life. But to me the real power of photography is based in death: the fact that somehow it can enliven that which is not there in a kind of stultifying frightened way, because it seems to me that part of one's life is made up of a constant confrontation with one's own death.

Barbara Kruger

[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.

Roland Barthes

Painting from life is a completely different monster, which I like. But because I've been painting from photography for so long, I've learned my best moves from photography.

Kehinde Wiley

If I photograph you I don't have you, I have a photograph of you. It's got its own thing. That's really what photography, still photography, is about.

Garry Winogrand

I realized that one of the differences between news photography and dance photography was that the former has to tell a specific story, whereas all a dance photograph had to be was visually interesting.

Lois Greenfield

To me, photography is like a quest, or a pilgrimage, or a hunt. I love painting, I love music, but photography is what has allowed me to get outside of myself.

Edouard Boubat

I was kind of a volatile personality, very intense. Because of that, I drew some criticism and people would say things about me, and my parents had tried to defend me. I would just tell them don't worry about it. Our day will come.

Kirk Gibson

Sweet is true love though given in vain, in vain; And sweet is death who puts an end to pain: I know not which is sweeter, no, not I. Love, art thou sweet? then bitter death must be: Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me. O Love, if death be sweeter, let me die. ... I fain would follow love, if that could be; I needs must follow death, who calls for me; Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Photography for me has been tremendously good, because I'm not a very sociable person. I'm happy reading or sitting in the library or going for walks. So photography has brought me in contact with people and made me understand people in a way that I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't been a photographer. And so I'm grateful for that, really.

Stuart Franklin

Press information is serious information, but press information is also manipulated by people who want you to think that this and that happened. So it's the old thing that you still cannot trust photography at all or you have to know who is distributing the photograph. In terms of cell phone photography, I think nobody cares about a photograph anymore because they're taking so many pictures just for fun.

Thomas Ruff

There's a big part of me that would love to be a secret agent. But if I showed up to do an investigation and interrogate someone now, they wouldn't be able to take me seriously. I've ruined that for myself.

Gillian Anderson

The first half of the 20th century belongs to Picasso, and the second half is about photography. They said digital would kill photography because everyone can do it, but they said that about the box brownie in 1885 when it came out. It makes photography interesting because everyone thinks they can take a picture.