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f I might put this differenrly: what founds che naturę of Photograph y is die pose. The phys-ical duration of this posc is of little consc-quence; evcn in the interval of a millionch of a second (Edgerton’s drop of milk) there has still !>een a pose, for the pose is not, herc, the attitude of the target or cven a tcthniąue of the Operator, but the term of an "intention” of reading: looking at a photograph, I incvitahly inelude in my scrutiny the thought of that instanc, however brief, in which a real thing happened to bc motionless in front of the eye. I projcct the present pfiOtograph’s immobility upon the past shot, and it is this arresc which constitutes the pose. This explains why the Phorograph's noeme de-teriorates when this Photograph is animared and bccomcs cinema: in the Photograph, somerhing has poscd in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever (that is my feeling); hut in cinema, something has passed in front of this same tiny hole: the posc is swept away and denied by the continuous scrics of images: it is a diflerent phenomcnology, and dterefore a different art which be-gins here, though dcrived front the first one.

In Photography, che presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric; and in the case of animated beings, their life as well, except in the case of photographing corpses; and even so: if tlte photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it ccrtifies, so to speak.

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that the corp.se is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing. For rhe photographs immobility is somehow the rcsult of a pcrverse confusion between two concepts: rhc Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surrcptitiously induces belief that it iTaIive, because of that delusion which niakes us ateribute tó~Rcahty anabsolutely superior, ,-somchow crerna] valuc; but by shitting this realicy co the past ("this-has-been”), the photograph suggests that it is already dcad. Hence it would be better to say that Photographys inimitable fcacure (its noeme) is that someone has seen the referent (cvcn if it is a macter of object$)J» (lesh and bfood. ot again in person. Photography, moreover, began, histori-cally, as an arc of the Person: of identiry, of civil status, of what we migltt cali, in all senses of the term, the body’s for mulity. Herc again, from a phenomenological viewpoint, the cinema begins to differ from the Photograph; for che (fictional) cinema combincs rwo poses: the actors "this-has-been” and rhe rolc’s, so thac (something I would not experienee bcforc a painting) I can never sec or scc again in a film ccrtain actors whom I know to be dcad without a kind of melancholy: the melancholy of Photography itself (I experiencc this same cmotion Iistening to the rccorded voices of dead singers).

I rhink again of the portrait of William Casby, "born a slave,” photographed by Avcdon. The noeme here is in-tense; for the man I sec here bas been a slavc: he certifics thac slavery has cxisted, not so far from us; and he certi-fies this not by hiscorical testimony but by a new, somehow experiential order of proof, although ir is the past

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