Jonathan Polkest Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not IMMEDIATELY or GENERALLY distinguished from its referent (as is the case for every other image, encumbered - from the start, and because of its status - by the way in which the object is simulated); it is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier (certain professionals do so), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection. By nature, the Photograph (for conveniences sake, let us accept this universal, which for the moment refers only to the tireless repitition of contingency) has something tautological about it; a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world; they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus. The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both; the windowpane and the landscape, and why not;Good and Evil, desire and its object; dualities we can conceive but not perceive (I did'nt yet know that this stubborness of the Referent in always being there would produce the essence I was looking for).