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Roland Barthes Quotes about Past

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Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

Roland Barthes
Fashion, Past, Oppression
Roland Barthes (1983). “Systeme de la Mode”, p.112, Univ of California Press

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Roland Barthes
Photography, Art, Past

For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.

Roland Barthes
Real, Past, Two
"Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography". Essay by Roland Barthes (translated by R. Howard), 1980.

Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded.

Roland Barthes
Fashion, Past, Doe
Roland Barthes (1983). “Systeme de la Mode”, p.128, Univ of California Press

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