Screen shot 13 02 08 at 05 59

see, consubstantial with hcr face, cach day of het long life.

Perhaps che air is ukimately somethłng morał, mysteri-ously contributing to the face the refletrion of a life valuc? Avcdon has phocographed the leader of the American Labor Party, Philip Randolph (who has just died, as I writc these lines); in the photograph, I read an air of goodness (no impulse of power: that is certain). Thus the air is che luminous shadow which accompanies the body; and if the photograph fails to show this air, then the body moves without a shadow, and once this shadow is severed, as in the myth of the Woman without a Shadow, thcrc remains no morc than a sccrilc body. It is by chis cenuous umbilical cord that the photographer gives life; if he can-not, either by kek of talent or bad luck, supply the transparent soul its bright shadow’, the subject dies forever. I have bcen photographed a thousand times; but if these thousand photographs have cach "missed” my air (and perhaps, after all, I havc nonę?), my effigy will perpetuate (for rhe limited time the paper lasts) my identity, not my value. Applied co someonc we lovc, this risk is lacerating: I can be frustrated for life of che “truć image." Since neśther Nadar nor Avedon has photographed my mother, che survival of this image has depended on the luck of a picturc madę by a provincial photographer who, an in-different mediator, himself long sińce dead, did not know that what hc was mak mg permanent was the truth—the truth for mc.

i i O /

Trying to make myself write somc sorc of com-mentary on the latest "emcrgency” reportage, I teat up my notes as soon as I write them. What—nothing to say abour death, suicide, wounds, ac-cidencs? No, nothing to say about these photographs in which I see surgeons' gowns, bodies lying on the ground, broken glass, etc. Oh, if there were only a look, a subjcct’s look, if only someone in the photographs were looking at me! For the Photograph has this power—which it is in-creasingly losing, che fronta! pose being most often con-sidered archaic nowadays—of looking mc straight in the eye (here, moreovcr, is another diffcrcnce: in film, no one ever looks at mc: it is forbidden—by the Fiction).

The photographic look has somcching paradoxical about it which is sometimes to be met with in life: the other day, in a cafe, a young boy camc in alonc, glanced around the room, and occasionally his cyes rested on mc; I rhen had che cercainty that hc was looking at mc without howcvcr being surę that he was seetng me: an inconceiv-able distortion: how can we look without sccing? One might say that the Photograph separates attention from pcrccprion, and yiclds up only the former, cvcn if it is impossiblc without the lattcr; this is that aberrant thing, noesis without noeme, an action of thought without thought, an aim without a target. And yet it is this scandal-ous movement which produces the rarest quality of an air. That is rhe paradox: how can one have an intelligent

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