A few more of Barthes' thoughts....

So.... last of the 'word' bites.

If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole time I remain with it? I look at it, I scrutinize it, as if I wanted to know more about the thing or the person it represents.

...what is hidden is for us Westerners more "true" that what is visible...

...Such is the Photograph: it cannot say what it lets us see...

I must therefor submit to this law: I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge.

If the Photograph cannot be penetrated, it is because of its evidential power. In the image, as Sartre says, the object yields itself wholly, and our vision of it is certain - contrary to the text or to other perceptions which give me the object in a vague, arguable manner, and therefore incite me to suspicions as to what I think I am seeing.

The photographic look has something paradoxical about it which is sometimes to be met with in life: the other day, in a café, a young boy came in alone, glanced around the room, and occasionally his eyes rested on me; I then had the certainty that he was looking at me without however being sure that he was seeing me: an inconceivable distortion: how can we look without seeing?

In the love stirred by Photography (by certain photographs), another music is heard, its name oddly old-fashioned: Pity.

In each of them (references to specific images preceed), inescapably, I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die....

What characterizes the so-called advanced societies is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs: they are therefore more liberal, less fanatical, but also more "false" (less "authentic")...