Electoral Photogeny - Roland Barthes (French Letters)

 ...Electoral photography is therefore the recognition of a certain depth, an irrational enterprise coextensive with politics.  What is transmitted in the candidate's photograph is not his projects but his motives, certain family circumstances as well as mental, even erotic characteristics, an entire style of being of which he is simultaneously the product, the example, and the appeal.  It is manifest that what most of our candidates offer in their effigy is a social position, the spectacular comfort of familial, juridical, religious norms, the innate possession of such bourgeois virtues as Sunday mass, xenophobia, steak-frites, and jokes about cheating on your wife - in short, what is called an ideology...the campaign photo is the mirror that reflects the familiar, the known, it proposes to the elector his own effigy clarified, magnified, proudly elevated into a type...( in, Mythologies)