Screen shot 13 02 08 at 04 21

(Hence the Winter Garden Photograph, however pale, is for me the treasury of rays which cmanated from my mother as a child, from her hair, her skin. her dress, her gazę, on that daj.)

35

The Phorograph does not cali up the past j (nothing Proustian in a phorograph). The j efTect it produces upon me is not to restore

what has bccn abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest tbat what I see has indeed existcd. Now, this is a strictly scandalous cffect. Always the Photograph a\ton-ishet mc, with an astonishment which endures and renews itself, inexhaustibly. Perhaps this astonishment, this per-sistcnce tcaches down into the religious substancc out of which I am molded; nothing for it: Photography has something to do with resurrection: might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Vcronica's napkin: that it was not madę by the hand of man, acheiropmetos?

Here arc some Polish soldiers resting in a field (Ker-tćsz, 1915); nothing extraordinary, except this, which no realist painting would give mc, that tbey u/cre thore\ what I see is not a memory, an imagination, a reconsri turion, a piece of Maya, such as art lavishcs upon us, but reality in a past State: at once the past and the real. What the Pho tograph feeds my mind on (though my mind is never sati-ated by it), by a brief action whose shock cannot drift

"lt ts postiblc that €mest is still alivc loday: but wbere? how? What a novel!"

A. Kunfez: ERNEST. Park, ,_9it