[b]Roland Barthes
There is a time when death is an event, an adventure, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.[/b]
He means his death, your death and my death.
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Though, sure, go ahead, take your chances.
Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
I must be doing it wrong then. Unless, of course, he is.
What I hide by my language, my body utters.
Here that gets particularly tricky.
The editors of Life rejected Kerész’s photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images ‘spoke too much’; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning from the literal one. Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
Or, going out on a very short limb, both.
Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to ‘express’ what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.
Or, going out on a very long limb, both.