Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]

 ...there is always a defeat of Time in [historical photographs]: that is dead and that is going to die. These two little girls looking at a primitive airplane above their village (they are dressed like my mother as a child, they are playing with hoops)—how alive they are! They have their whole lives before them; but also they are dead (today), they are then already dead (yesterday). 
 Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. 
 By nature, the photograph... has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. 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 moving world. 
 ...I search hard to find the obvious meaning. (Photo: powerless to say what is obvious. The birth of literature.) 
 [T]he photograph allows the photographer to conceal elusively the preparation to which he subjects the scene to be recorded. 
 I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake... In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself she is going to die... Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. 
 The image freezes an endless number of possibilities; words determine a single certainty... this is why all news photographs are captioned. 
 A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration... 
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