Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it.
For me, color is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses).
I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?
The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the subject but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.
Photography has something to do with resurrection... the survival of this image has depended on the luck of a picture made by a provincial photographer who, an indifferent mediator, himself long since dead, did not know that was he was making permanent was the truth—the truth to me.
Truly traumatic photographs are rare, for in photography the trauma is wholly dependent on the certainty that the scene ‘really’ happened:
the photographer had to be there (the mythical definition of denotation).
There are moments when I detest Photographs: what have I to do with Atget’s old tree trunks, with Pierre Boucher’s nudes, with Germain Krull’s double exposures (to cite only the old names)?
I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking in my arms what is dead, what is going to die, as Nietzsche did when… [falling into madness] on January 3, 1889, he threw himself in tears on the neck of a beaten horse, gone mad for Pity’s sake.
