The Photograph (n.) is a mad image, a temporal hallucination that caricatures not figure, but time itself. It is a hallucination on the one hand in that 'it is not there,' on the other 'but it has indeed been'.
The Photograph (n.) is a motionless image... this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move... it means that they do not emerge and they do not leave: They are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
A Photograph (n.) is a partial object, a collection of little features which delight and which are able to flatter certain fetishes in us.
A Photograph (n.) is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
A Photograph (n.) is always invisible: It is not it that we see. It is like the windowpane and the landscape.
The Photograph (n.) is, as an image, a message without a code.
The Photograph (n.) is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here... the duration of the transmission is insignificant... the photograph of the missing being, as sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
The Photograph (n.) is always a certificate of presence.
The Photograph (n.) is a thing which, in order to see it well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.
The Photograph's (n.) immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: The real and the live: By attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to reality an absolute superior, somehow eternal value... but by shifting this reality to the past ('this-has-been'), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.
The Photograph's (n.) rise corresponds precisely to the explosion of the public into the private... or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: The private is consumed as such, publicly.
The Photograph (n.) is, for the realist, not a 'copy' of reality, but an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
The Photograph (n.) is a thing which to look at is really to look at the return of the dead.
The Photograph (n.) is violent: Not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force( and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: Many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so).
The Photograph (n.) is, when looked at, the advent of oneself as other. It is a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.