The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence-as if it caricatured not the
figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence. The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where
I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hal... (查看原文)
the other means of taming the Photograph is to generalize, to gregarize, banalize it until it is no longer fronted by any image in relation to which it can mark itself, assert its special character, its scandal, its madness. (查看原文)
when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.
Mad or tame? Photography can be one or the other: tame if its realism remains relative, tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits (to leaf through a magazine at the hairdresser's, the dentist's); mad if this realism is absolute and, so to speak, original, obliging the loving and terrified consciousness to return to the very letter of Time: a strictly revulsive movement which reverses the course of the thing, and which I shall call, in conclusion, the photographic ecstasy. (查看原文)
Pour moi, le bruit du Temps n'est pas triste : j'aime les cloches, les horloges, les montres - et je me rappelle qu'à l'origine, le matériel photographique relevait des techniques de l'ébénisterie et de la mécanique de précision : les appareils, au fond, étaient des horloges à voir, et peut-être en moi, quelqu'un de très ancien entend encore dans l'appareil photographique le bruit vivant du bois. (查看原文)
The fatality involves Photography in the vast disorder of objects- of all the objects in the world : why choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other?
Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see. (查看原文)
