The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.Roland Barthes
In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else.Roland Barthes
I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme), but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think.Roland Barthes
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.Roland Barthes
The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence.Roland Barthes
The Photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.Roland Barthes
A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).Roland Barthes
Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.'Roland Barthes
The Photograph, then, is a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination.Roland Barthes
Photography’s referent is not the same as the referents of other systems of representation. I call 'referent' not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph.Roland Barthes
What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.Roland Barthes
From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.Roland Barthes
Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of 'posing', I instantaneously make another body for myself.Roland Barthes