Someone's else's thoughts....

From Barthes' Camera Lucida...

Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.

The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lense, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.

Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me (the "intention" according to which I look at it) is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph.

As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for "sentimental" reasons; 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.

Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it - and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.

I call " photographic referent" not the optionally real thing to which and image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has to be placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it.

What I intentionalize in a photograph (we are not yet speaking of film) is neither Art nor Communication, it is Reference, which is the founding order of Photography.

The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive.

The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.

Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

The last relates to the writers realisation whilst looking at an image of his dead mother as a child that she is going to die and she is already dead. This will be and this has been. The catastrophe which has already occurred. It is an endless loop... look she's alive ... oh right ... she's dead... but look, she's alive....