欧宝娱乐

I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like, the 'snapping' of the photographer has had the greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott鈥檚 psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.

When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.

Ultimately 鈥� or at the limit 鈥� in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 鈥楾he necessary condition for an image is sight,鈥� Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 鈥榃e photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

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 on 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 hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand 鈥渋t is not there,鈥� on the other 鈥渂ut it has indeed been鈥�): a mad image, chafed by reality.