"By making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of 'what has been,' modern society has renounced the monument. A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening. --And no doubt, the astonishment of 'that-has-been' will also disappear."
-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
