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144 pages, Paperback
First published February 21, 1980
ما يرفع من شأن الصورة هو الحب .. الحب المفرط
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هو "أنا " الذى لا يتطابق أبدا مع صورتى
لأن الصورة هي التي تبدو ثقيلة..ساكنة..عنيدة
وهو "أنا" الذى أبدو خفيفا منقسما مشتتا
لا أبقى ساكنا
بل مهتاجا في إنائي كعفريت العلبة
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قد يحدث أن أكون مُراقبا دون أن أدري
ولكني في أحيان كثيرة وبمشيئتي يتم تصويري على دراية مني
بيد أني متى أشعر أنني مُراقَب من قبل العدسة، حتى يتغير كلّ شيء
أتشكّل منشغلا باتخاذ وضعا أمام الكاميرا ، أصنع لنفسي في الحال جسدا آخر
أتحول سلفا إلى صورة، وأشعر أن الصورة توجِد جسدي وتُميته، وفقا إرادتها الخاصة.
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ولكن ما أريده أن يدرك هو النسيج المعنوي الرقيق، وليست المحاكاة
فأنا لا أعرف كيف أجسد ما يجيش في نفسي
أقرر أن أدع ابتسامة خفيفة تطفو على شفتي وفي عيني أريد لها أن تكون غامضة
بحيث أعبر في آن واحد عن خصائص طبيعتي ودرايتي الساخرة بكل طقوس الفوتوغرافيا
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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’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.Every photo is a commingling of love and death, a realm of life lost and life left for losing. There is a beauty in life which is lost when it pinned down in art, art of any kind, but especially Photography. While literature, painting, drawing, music, all take life and attempt to pin it down, they also add something that life hadn't had before. In photography, nothing is added, it is frozen life, it is death, there is nothing which supports it, nothing which adorn it, we see nothing added, we are only reminded of what has been removed.
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.Our purposive remembering, our memories which we force-fit into words, into images, die - they are no longer what they were, they have been forced to change mediums, and something is lost: the beauty of life. The photograph only appears a representation of reality, it is only, rather, an expression of loss, of what can never be again. It is often in art that the afflatus of creation is to exorcise, to kill away, that which burns inside the artist, to cleanse the spirit of the past. But there is a danger in this, in the abundance of photography, that our memories will become extinct.
Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.Photographs, unlike other arts, are too immediate, seem too real (though they are unreal): the kill memory forever. Photographs do not shut the eyes, but gouge them out: we become Oedipus fleeing reality as it is, in a vain blindness which forces us to remember only what we hoped to lose, and lose only what we hoped to remember.
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 “it is not there,” on the other “but it has indeed been”): a mad image, chafed by reality.