The Necessary Condition For An Image Is

For Me The Noise Of Time Is Not Sad: I Love Bells, Clocks, Watches — And I Recall That At First Photographic Implements Were Related To Techniques Of Cabinetmaking And The Machinery Of Precision: Cameras, In Short, Were Clocks For Seeing, And Perhaps In Me Someone Very Old Still Hears In The Photographic Mechanism The Living Sound Of The Wood.

There Are Two Kinds Of Liberalism. A Liberalism Which Is Always, Subterraneously Authoritative And Paternalistic, On The Side Of One's Good Conscience. And Then There Is A Liberalism Which Is More Ethical Than Political; One Would Have To Find Another Name For This. Something Like A Profound Suspension Of Judgment.

For The Photograph's 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 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.

It Is No Longer The Sexual Which Is Indecent, It Is The Sentimental.