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had just discovered. "Not a just image, just an image," Godard says. Dut my grief waneed a just image, an image which would be both justice and accuracy—justesse: just an image, but a just image. Such, for mc, was rhc Winter Garden Photograph.

For once, photography gave me a sentiment as cettain as remcmbrancc.j just as Proust expericnccd it one day when, leaning ovcr to take off his boots, there suddenly came to him his grandmother’s true face, "whose iiving reality I was experiencing for die first timc, in an involun-tary and complete memory." The unknown photographer of Chcnnevieres-sur-Marnc had been the mediator of a truth, as much as Nadar making of his mother (or of his wifc—no one knows for certain) one of the loveliest pho-tographs in the world; he had produced a supererogatory photograph which containcd morę than what the ccch-nical bcing of photography can rcasonably ofier. Or again (for I am trying to exptcss this truth) this Winter Garden Photograph was for mc Iike the last musie Schumann wrote before collapsing, that first Gesang der Fruhe which accords with both my mothers being and my grief at her death; I could not express this accord except by an infinite scrics of adjectives, which I omit, convjnced however rhat this photograph collectcd all the possiblc prcdicates from which my mocher's being was constituted and whose sup-pression or partial altcration, convcrscly, had sent mc back to these photographs of her which had left me so unsarisfied. These same photographs, which phenomcnol-ogy would cali "ordinary" objects, were mcrcly analogi-cal, provoking only her identity, not her mich; but rhc Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me. utopically, the impossibie science: of the

Hnique being.

Nor could I omit this from my rcflcction: that I had discovcrcd this photograph by moving back through Time. The Grccks entered inro

Death baekward: what they had bcforc them was their past. In the same way I worked back through a life, not my own, bur the lifc of somcone I love. Starting from her latcst image, taken the sumtncr bcforc her dcath (so tited, so noble, sitting in front of the door of our house, sur-rounded by my friends), I atrived, traversing three-quarters of a century, at the image of a child: I stare mtenscly at the Sovereign Good of childhood, of the mother, of the mother-as-child. Of course I was then los-ing her wice ovet, in her finał fatiguc and in her first photograph, fot me the last; but it was also at this moment that everything turncd around and I discovered her as into kerself ... (. . . eternity cbanges her, to complete Mallarme s verse).

This movcmcnt of the Photograph (of the order of photographs) I havc experienccd in rcality. At the end of hec life, shorcly before the moment when I looked through her pictures and discovered the Winter Garden Photograph, my mother was wcak, very weak. I livcd in her wcakness

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