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September 28, 2007

for pity's sake

Is one not in love with certain photographs? (Looking at some photographs of the Proustian world, I fell in love with Julia Barter, with the Duc de Guiche…) Yet it was not quite that. It was a broader current than a lover’s sentiment. In the love stirred by Photography (by certain photographs), another music is heard, its name oddly old-fashioned: Pity. I collected in the last thought the images which had “pricked” me. In each of them, inescapably, I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die, as Nietzsche did when, as Podach tells us, on January 3, 1889, he threw himself in tears on the neck of a beaten horse: gone mad for Pity’s sake.


Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida

Posted by amin at September 28, 2007 10:23 PM