Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]

 In an initial period, photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. 
 Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory... but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory. 
 Pornography ordinarily represents the sex-organ, it makes it into an immobile object (a fetish), to which we burn incense, like a god that doesn’t leave its niche. 
 When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead. 
 A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see. 
 A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed. 
 I place myself in the situation of the naïve man, outside culture, someone untutored who would be constantly astonished at photography. 
 [The pornographic photograph] is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex… 
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