Sublime

Photography is the inventory of mortality.

Sensations, feelings, the abstract forms and styles of sensibility count. It is to these that contemporary art addresses itself.

The camera/gun does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems to be all bluff—like a man’s fantasy of having a gun, knife, or tool between his legs. Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have;

Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can’t possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images—as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can’t possess the present but one can possess the past. Nothing could be more unlike the self-sacrificial travail of an

She looked at her lap, then at me. “Nobody likes to feel that you really don’t look the way you used to look.” She paused. “I think we’re not as aware of it in ourselves because it happens gradually. I do see it in others.”

When someone you love suffers, you’ve failed to protect them. This may

In fact, using a camera is not a very good way of getting at someone sexually. Between photographer and subject, there has to be distance. The camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate—all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove,