Roland Barthes Quotes

I don't want the pictures to mean things. But the implication of the image and its relationship to the people that are viewing it is something I'm really interested in.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

Hence it is that the shape of something is especially meaningful.

Painting does more than just point to things. The very act of pointing is a value statement.

All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.

It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.

Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.

Any photograph has multiple meanings: indeed, to see something in the form of a photograph is to encounter a potential object of fascination. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “There is the surface. Now think – or rather feel, intuit – what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.

Through the very culture of representation through form, we have come to see that the abstract - like the mathematical - is actually expressed in and through all things, although not determinately.

Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.

We do not need to have a way to talk clearly about other people's images.

Humans can really reveal themselves through what they choose to see as the most important or meaningful detail in an image.

Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter.

Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.

Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level, there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to perform a particular function.

You can't be a passive recipient of images, you have to engage with images and read their subtexts. These are critical things that will be taught to the students by a film club.

Artists have historically understood images better than anyone else. This is what we do.

Drawing is the first language of the human being before writing. It's a transcription of how the human being sees reality, not reality itself.

I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.