the first general synod of the Church of Scotland in 1843 on a long series
of portrait photographs. But these pictures he took himself. And it is they,
unpretentious makeshifts meant for internal use, that gave his name a place
in history, while as a painter he is forgotten. Admittedly a number of his
studies lead even deeper into the new technology than this series of por-
traits—anonymous images, not posed subjects. Such figures had long been
the subjects of painting. Where the painting remained in the possession of
a particular family, now and then someone would ask about the person
portrayed. But after two or three generations this interest fades; the pictures,
if they last, do so only as testimony to the art of the painter. With photog-
raphy, however, we encounter something new and strange: in Hill's New-
haven fishwife, her eyes cast down in such indolent, seductive modesty, there
remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer's art,
something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to
know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now
is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in "art."
And I ask: How did the beauty of that hair,
those eyes, beguile our forebears? How did that mouth kiss, to which desire curls up senseless as smoke without fire? 6
Or you turn up the picture of Dauthendey the photographer, the father of
the poet, from the time of his engagement to that woman whom he found
one day, shortly after the birth of her sixth child, lying in the bedroom of
his Moscow house with her veins slashed. Here she can be seen with him.
He seems to be holding her. but her gaze passes him by, absorbed in an
ominous distance. Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you
will realize to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise
technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture
can never again have for us. No matter how artful the photographer, no
matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge
to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and
now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the
inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment
the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. For
it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye:
"other" above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness
gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is a common-
place that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of
walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens
during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Pho-
tography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the
secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this