Roland Barthes Quotes

Everyone likes taking their own photos and seeing themselves reflected back.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

People see images now more than they see movies.

In a way, it's like the photographer always has his vision of me. The pictures that I'm known for are not really my image, they're always the photographer's vision of me. I can look a hundred different ways, but what people see of me in pictures is not really my image.

I am actually turned off when I look at an account and don’t see any selfies, because I want to know whom I’m dealing with. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, 'Hello, this is me.'

It's nice to always make an effort when you get photographed.

In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.

Journalists have sometimes looked to my Twitter account and quoted me from there, and that's fine because that's public domain. I know exactly what I'm doing when I post something on Twitter; in a way, it's saying, 'This is who I am, and I don't have anything to hide.'

In the age of cellphone cameras, everybody thinks of themselves as a tracker.

And it seems to be today, image is a real important thing once again.

The grand surprise has really been the fact that being an author, which to me had always implied being a private person, actually requires you to be a public person as well, and those are two separate entities to me.

The more of your private life you put into the public domain, the smaller your private life becomes.

But I think we're also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They've seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There's so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

In front of the camera I look and I see visually what I've created.

Nothing is really real unless it “happens” on television…Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic – or rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television

Image has become everything.

I am not sure that the inner world of teenage girls has changed. What's most important to kids today is still the same stuff.

It's odd seeing yourself on screen at all.

Pictures are packaged and cast by agents.

A selfie is a sort of interesting way to reclaim the gaze, right? You're looking at yourself and taking a photo while looking at everyone. But also, who cares?

Fashion has always had the ability to affect lives, to touch people. But for the longest period of time, we've said, 'Oh, we're just pages of a magazine; that's what we all look at.' It's more than that.

We are really focused on the beauty enthusiast... but also, as you know, everybody has got a great phone in their pocket. Everybody is taking pictures. Who doesn't want to look good in a picture? I don't know anybody who doesn't.

Perhaps 'photography' has become so all-pervasive that it no longer makes sense to think about it as a discreet practice or field of inquiry. In other words, perhaps 'photography,' as a meaningful cultural trope, is over.

My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world for us, I would not be happy about it.