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into reveric (this is perhaps the dcfinition of salon), is the simple mystery of concomirance. An anonymous photograph reprcsents a wedding (in England): twenty-five persons of all age-s, two littlc girls, a baby: I read the datę and I compute: 1910, so they must all be dead, extepc perliaps the little girls, the baby (old ladics, an old gentleman now). When I see the beach at Biarritz in 1931 (Lartigue) or the Pont des Arts in 1932 (Kertesz), I say to myself: "Maybe I was there"; maybe that’s me among the bathers or the pedestrians, one of those summer after-noons when I took the tram from Bayonne to go for a swim on the Grandę Plagę, or one of those Sunday morn-ings when, coming from our apartment in the Rue Jacques Callot, I crossed the bridge to go to the Tempie de 1'Oratoire (Christian phase of my adolcscencc). The datę bclongs to the photograph: not because it denotes a scylc (this does not conccrn me), but bccause it makes mc lift my head, allows mc to compute life, dcath, the inexor-able extinction of the generations: it is possible that Ernest, a schoolboy photographed in 1931 by Kertesz, is still alive today (but wherc? how? What a novcl!). I am the reference of cvery photograph, and this is what genetates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamcntal qucstion: why is it that I am alive bert- and now? Of course, morę than other arts, Photography offers an im-mediate presence to the world—a co-presente; but this prcsencc is not only of a political order (“to participate by the image in contemporary evcnts"), it is also of a metaphysical order. Flaubert derided (but did he rćally deride?) Bouv3rd and Pćcuchet investigating the sky, the siars, time, lifc, infinity, etc. It is this kind of question that Photography raiscs for me: questions which derive from a "siupid” or simple metaphysics (it is the answcrs which are complicatcd): prolably the truć metaphysics.

The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for tertain what has

:^cr>. _This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness docs not necessarily take the nostalgie path of memory (how many photographs arc oursidc of individual time), hut for every photograph ex-isting in the world, rhc path of certainty: the Photographs cssence is to ratify what it represents. One day I receivcd from a photographcr a picturc of myself which I could not remember bcing taken, for all my efforts; I inspectcd the tie, the sweater, to discovcr in what circumstances I had worn them; to no avail. And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had lieen there (cven if I did not know where). This distortion between certainty and oblivion gavc me a kind of vertigo, something of a "dctcc-dve" anguish (the rheme of Blow-Up was nor far off); I went to the photographcr’s show as to a police investiga-tion, to learn at last what I no longer knew about myself.

No writing can give me this certainty. ft is rhc misfor-tune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasuce) of language not to be able to authcnticatc itself. The noeme