I was incredibly lucky with my first roll, which rendered 33 (our of possible 36) fairly decent exposures. I find this particular one quite intriguing. Is it mimicking anything, and if so, what? The découpage matters here, specially for what happens inside the mould. Nothing moves or seems to take place. And yet, more than any action-centered photograph, this one theorizes what one understands of “something is happening”. Something is being staged here. Yes, photography does not simply capture, but it also stages.
According to Barthes,
“Take the Western theater of the last few centuries; its function is essentially to manifest what is supposed to be secret (‘feeling,’ ‘situations’, ‘conflicts’), while concealing the very artifice of such manifestation (machinery, painting, makeup, the sources of light). The stage since the REnaissance is the space of this life: here everything occurs in an interior surreptitiously open, surprised, spied on, savored by a spectator crouching in the shadows. This space is theological–it is the space of Sin: on one side, in a light which he pretends to ignore, the actor, i.e. the gesture and the word; on the other, in the darkness, the public, i.e., consciousness” (Empire of Sings, 61)
Just as the stage and cinema, photography mounts an interplay of what is seen and unseen, exhibited and concealed. Photography seems to solidify the enlightenment ideology that seeing is believing. Within that logical system of causality and isomorphism, what is not visible becomes a secret, at best, or meaningless or implausible at worst.
Visibility and visualizing becomes to configure our understanding and senses of reality. Reality is that which enters the frame. Reality, as a result, reasserts itself as an optical phenomenon. According to Deleuze,
“a matter of a new form of reality, said to be dispersive, elliptical, errant or wavering, working in blocs, with deliberately weak connections and floating events. The real is no longer represented or reproduced but ‘aimed at.’ Instead of representing an already ‘deciphered ‘ real; neo-realism aims at an always ambiguous, to be deciphered, real; this is why the sequence shot tended to replace the montage of representations” (Cinema 2, 3).
Realism 