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which is in qucscion—a proof no longer merely induced:

thc proof-according-to-St.-Thomas-seeking-totouch-chc-res-urrecced-Christ. I remember keeping for a long timc a photograph I had cut out of a magazinc—lost subsc-qucntly, likc evcrything too carefully puc away—which showed a slave market: thc slavcmaster, in a hat, stand-ing; the slaves, in loinclochs, sitting. I rcpcat: a phoro-graph, not a drawing or engraving; for my horror and my fascination as a child ca me from chis: that thcre was a certainty that such a thing had existed: not a qucscion of exactitude, but of realicy: thc historian was no longer the mediator, slavcry was given without mcdiation, the fact was establishcd without met bod.

It is often said that it was the paintcrs who in-ventcd Photography (by bequcathing it thcir framing, thc Albertian perspective, and thc optic of the camera obscura). I say: no, it was the chcm-ists. For the noeme "That-has-bccn" was possible only on the day when a scientific circumstancc (the discovery that silvcr halogcns were scnsitivc to light) madę it possible to recovcr and print directly the luminous rays emictcd by a variously lighted ohject. The photograph is licerally an __emanacion of tl>e referent. From a rcal body, which was Ihere, procecd radiations which ultimately touch me, who a~m here^the duracion of thc tranśfnisśion is insignihcanć; tłte photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will

touch mc like thc dclaycd rays of a star. A sort of um-bilical cord links thc body ot the photographed thing to my gazc: light, though impalpable, is herc a carnal medium, a skin I sharc with anyone who has been pl>oto-graphed.

It seems that in Latin "photograph” would bc said "imago Iucis opera expressa”; which is to say: itnage re-vcalcd, "extracted," "tnounted," "cxprcsscd” (likc thc juice of a Icmon) by the action of light. And if Photogra-phy belonged to a world with some residual seositmty to myth, we should cxult ovcr thc richness of the symbol: the Ioved body is immortalizcd by the mediation of a precious meral, silvcr (monument and luxury); to which we mighr add the notion that this metal, like all the metals of Al-chemy, is alivc.

Pcrhaps it is becausc I am dclightcd <or depressed) to know that thc thing of the past, by its immediatc radia-rions (its luminances), has really touched thc surface w^fhich in its turn my gazc will touch, that l am not very fond of Color. An anonymous daguerreotype of 1843 shows a man and a woman in a medalIion subsequcntly tinted by thc miniaturists on the Staff of the photographic studio: I always feel (unimportant what actually occurs) that in the same way, color is a coating applied laler on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph. For mc, color is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpscs). Whar matters to me is not the photo-graphs "life" (a purely idcological notion) but thc certainty that the photographed body touclłcs mc with its own rays and not with a superadded light.