Index Cards

Here Malcolm puts her own artful spin on Benjamin’s famous allusion to the camera’s ability “with its devices of slow motion and enlargement” to reveal hidden and unseen truths: “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of [the] optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

“We are all so overwhelmed by culture that it is a relief to see something which is done directly, without any intention of being good or bad, done only because one wants to do it.”

Genet disdained bourgeois pretension, as did Walser, who lived an almost Gandhian simplicity.

utterly sanguine

“The dullest, most inept and inconsequential snapshot, when isolated, framed (on a wall or by the margins of a book), and paid attention to, takes on all the uncanny significance, fascination, and beauty of R. Mutt’s fountain

Now that photo is all over the internet, completely out of my control.

“taking the time to live.”

the photograph as “memento mori” and “inventory of mortality”

Hungover. Sniffly. Sound of bells. Sound of singing. Crash of stocks.

she was a believer in wholesomeness and common sense in an age of superstition and quackery.