Listening to Images

These photographs, finally, are mirrors, not windows. We look into them, and what they reflect back to us is something monstrous and hard to reconcile with our notion of ourselves. We look, and look, and then—sated with looking, secure in our reactions, perennially missing the point—we put them away.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychi

the work of psychologist Akhter Ahsen. Ahsen developed a process by which the practitioner taps into eidetic imagery as a therapeutic tool by posing a series of questions that call to mind specific images. The therapist then helps the patient understand the physical and/or emotional responses to these images, and to discern their meaning. An eideti