"Then I decided that this disorder and this dilemma, revealed by my desire to write on Photography, corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis--but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naïve it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system." - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981): 8.

"Is a verbal vision possible? Do not words, written or oral, interpose their opacity between readers and their visual experience of the world? Can language be effaced as such to the point where it become transparent to things, and can it from that point on display the thing itself in its truth even as it offers to the dazzled eye its simulacrum and its presence?" - Louis Marin, "Mimesis and Description," On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001): 64-84, 78-79.