Two quotes from Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes

“a specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent (As is the case for every other image, encumbered from the start, and because of its status – by the way in which the object is simulated): it is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier… but returned a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection”[1]


“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: they are glued together, limb by limb, like a condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus”[2]



[1] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5.
[2] Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5-6.