Fotograf Magazine

Two types of absence are visualised in the meeting of the face with photography and of photography with the face: one is inherent to photography, and the other belongs solely to the face. The first is the Barthesian absence of the moment of taking the photograph that is lost in the instant when the light drafts the image in the photosensitive emulsion. From then on, the photographic image only stubbornly repeats this single, but inevitable and unquestionable assertion: this
object has been here, but its reality consists precisely in that it is unreachable – it is a moment which has been and will never repeat itself again. Not even when we return to the photograph again – even repeatedly – since even then we are merely facing the absence of that which has been and is no longer. We are facing the impermeable reality of that which cannot be reached. The time-tense of photography therefore is, as it were, the plu-future past tense, transposed to the future as an empty diagram of death: this has been, and we know it will be – and yet all this took place before the moment in which I am looking at this picture – because all of this has been separated from the picture once the camera captures it once and forever. It is remarkable that this presence, once transposed into its own absence, is an intrinsic part of all that is unique, and one of a kind. For the unique is also in a sense unattainable: although it is not hiding, it is out of reach in its ostensible presence before our eyes – since it cannot be included under any common notion that would allow us to capture and describe this unique thing. What is unique is in fact absent, since it is lost in any description that must by necessity distort by way of transposing its uniqueness to commonly known features: it is round like countless round things; it is red just as countless red things are; it is a face just like innumerable other faces.