Painting Can Feign Reality Without Having Seen

Every Exploration Is An Appropriation.

In Front Of The Photograph Of My Mother As A Child, I Tell Myself: She Is Going To Die: I Shudder, Like Winnicott's Psychotic Patient, Over A Catastrophe Which Has Already Occurred. Whether Or Not The Subject Is Already Dead, Every Photograph Is This Catastrophe.

Television Doomed Us To The Family, Whose Household Instrument It Has Become-what The Hearth Used To Be, Flanked By The Communal Kettle.

The Photograph Is Literally An Emanation Of The Referent. From A Real Body, Which Was There, Proceed Radiations Which Ultimately Touch Me, Who Am Here; The Duration Of The Transmission Is Insignificant; The Photograph Of The Missing Being, As Sontag Says, Will Touch Me Like The Delayed Rays Of A Star.

For The Photograph's Immobility Is Somehow The Result Of A Perverse Confusion Between Two Concepts: The Real And The Live: By Attesting That The Object Has Been Real, The Photograph Surreptitiously Induces Belief That It Is Alive, Because Of That Delusion Which Makes Us Attribute To Reality An Absolute Superior, Somehow Eternal Value; But By Shifting This Reality To The Past ("this-has-been"), The Photograph Suggests That It Is Already Dead.