Roland BarthesThinkers

Alienation is only able to be escaped in present day society by retreating ahead of it.

The Amateur is, in photography, something unique in that he stands closer to the essence of the field than does the master.

America is a place where everything is transformed into images: Only images exist and are produced and are consumed.

A Biographeme is a partial biographical feature in a writer's life which delights one much like that partial object, the photograph.

The Body is always only experienced as an image. One can never see oneself except as an image. One never sees ones eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens. Even and especially for one's own body, one is condemned to the repertoire of its images.

The Book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.

The Camera is originally related to cabinet making, and the machinery of precision such as clocks and watches. In short, cameras were clocks for seeing.

The Camera was originally seen as a clock for seeing.

The Car is the supreme creation of an era... just like the great gothic cathedrals it is conceived with passion by unknown artist, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

The Chronological illusion is the wrongheaded idea that time exist, whereas it is in fact a structural category of narrative, just as in langue temporality only exist in the form of a system... from the point of view of narrative, what we call time does not exist, or at least only exist functionally, as an element of a semiotic system.