Roland Barthes Quotes

Memory demands an image.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

Where the eye is focused, there the imagination finds its raw material. The right focus must be won at immense cost and discipline. Train the eye to see the good, and the imagination will follow suit.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

I want people to look at a checkerboard and think of me!

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

Draw what you see.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

Therefore, when we arrive in a place and talk to new people about a new image, it is very hard for them to visualize it. That's where the drawings are very important, because at least we can show a projection of what we believe it will look like.

As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

The camera can photograph thought.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Everybody has their thing they like or don't like to see. It's all in your head. That's why people take their own pictures, because it's difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

I'm a relentless sketcher. It goes back to how you process the world around you - the whole left-brain, right-brain thing. Some people are data-driven. I've always been more visual.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

I see through my eyes; the camera is just a machine to record it for me.

I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.