Life In Patrick Modiano's Afterimage

“In “Three Pictures” Woolf speaks of how individuals tend to view each other as “pictures” hanging on a wall and how each individual admires the life that the other is living. “Three Pictures” is divided into three sections marked as the first, second and third “pictures” and each section highlights the different pictures that came to the narrators mind during the course of her day. For example, in the first “picture”, the narrator sees a young sailor and his wife walk past her. The narrator takes note of minor details and then begins to surmise what happy things are going to happen in their lives. The narrator states that “. . .at odd moments during that day and the next the picture returned to one’s mind, and one thought with envy, but with kindness, of the happy sailor and his wife. . .” (Woolf, “Three Pictures” 1381-1382). However, in the second and third “pictures” the story takes on a sinister tone. The narrator was lying in bed on a peaceful evening when a scream pierced the tranquil night. Unable to find its source the author falls asleep, only to discover in the third “picture” that the source of the scream was the “happy sailor’s” wife mourning her husband’s death. This story paints a somber picture, however, it illustrates the fact that Woolf was able to use the art if language to portray any

In the first episode of “Ways of seeing”, John Berger explores the change of people’s judgement and understanding of art after the invention of the camera. Throughout the video, Berger explains how a camera’s angles, distance and features, such as zoom-ins and zoom-outs can affect one’s perception of fine art and how art has become ambiguous. This essay is going to explore how the invention of the camera and its features can provide several interpretations to art pieces and images.

NYC-based photographer Lucea Spinelli’s latest series titled Phōtosgraphé explores the movement of light in photography and the perception of reality. Spinelli reminds us instantly of photography’s purpose and origin. It is defined as a process of drawing with light. Its etymology implies a compound of the greek words φωτός (phōtos) “light” and γραφή (graphé) which is defined as “drawing”. The fleeting movement of the illumination becomes the paintbrush on its canvas, the film. “Like a human eye, the camera receives impressions of light reflected off the world around us. “

Pictures hold memories; our pasts, the moments we want hidden, the moments we want to keep alive-- photography is indiscriminate. I cannot write a memoir on my early life with an accompanying picture, I do not even own one. It was not a lack of cameras, on the contrary, every singular moment of my early life was dominated by the obnoxious flashy lights. There are over 200 pictures of me that I know of, and many more that have yet to cross my path, however, the few I do know of are kept, under lock and key, by my father. I use my eyes as my cameras now, storing them on my harddrive, in a place only I can see. I have no picture of my presumably happy self to show, no picture holding my loose tooth, nearly drowning, or falling off my bike. All

TXT- He worked with a narrative style of photography by seizing images that were expressionism or abstract to reveal his subjects characteristics into his compositions and work the surroundings of the environment. Pg 307

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” (Sontag, 15-16)

Jeff Wall reviews his decades of practices as a photographer in his article “Frames of Reference.” In his prose, Wall explains how he learnt from multiple forms of art and apply essential ideas embedded in these various forms to his work of photography. He characterizes two elements in his work, the large and the representation of the nature and existence, which he extracts from the criteria of Western painting and utilize in his photograpic works. To analyze the purpose of Wall’s approach, it is vital to know how his understanding of photography works and practices developed through his career.

Photography has always been a way of documenting time, a memory sealed into an image and held there forever. This is a brief documentation of a place or a person capsuled in time, with the history and the memory intertwined with the image. However, as the photographs age and the decades pass, the images stay the same but the memory fades away along with the audience of that era. What happens to these photographs once the memory has faded away? John Stezaker became fascinated with these long forgotten images from before his time, and felt drawn into recreating memories of people in the images and giving them a new lease of life. A brief run through of Stezaker’s career and a study of his art will perhaps give us a clearer view of what drew him to these images in particular and why he felt the need to create new from old.

For an unknown reason a person stops walking. Out of the corner of their eye they catch a glance, a brief moment of beauty, of a photograph. The photograph is not grand, it is a not a “Mona Lisa”, and it would be considered lucky to be even sold for a fifty dollars. Yet, the person is compelled to stop and stare at it. The is person is entranced by the photograph, overwhelmed by millions of pixels, manifesting emotions of an untold story.

Photography is an art form that plays with the mind. Photographs are perhaps one of the most layered and contradictory objects we can see around us. They represent reality, but yet somehow they don’t - they don’t capture the whole of reality, rather just a snapshot of it. There is always a constant battle going on between the two photographic considerations: make the photographed object look as beautiful as possible or tell the truth. What a picture finally really shows is never the exact situation as it really was, but it proves to somehow represent it. This treacherous and ambiguous relationship with reality is what makes photography interesting, yet so astounding; it raises questions about the

Photography is a field that is steeped in ambiguity, it is an art form, a form of evidence both in scientific and legal processes, it is used heavily in advertising and also in journalism. Photojournalism relies on the “truth claim” of photography, that if a subject was photographed it existed in that way. Yet the majority of a photographer’s photos do not make it into the display whether in a magazine or exhibit. While showing the entirety of the photographer’s series might be argued to have more truth since it removes some of the curatorial process, photography’s power is found in showing a specific scene. Freezing time in a key moment to convey the overall feeling is effective for conveying a message, one can be impacted by the photograph. However photographs cannot express the story they capture on their own. Whether they are displayed in magazines or exhibits, photographs are accompanied by text giving the context of the situation. In the exhibit “The Making of an Argument” Russell Lord focuses on Gordon Park’s first feature for Time magazine, “Harlem Gang Leader”, to deconstruct the process from the photographs to the resulting magazine article. Taking into account the selection of photographs to fit a narrative and the relationship between the captions and the photographs. Using this initial analysis as a base I will be analyzing the editing and manipulation of photographs in “Harlem Gang Leader” to analyze not only Time’s argument but Lord’s, to prove photographic

Pictorialism was a movement during the beginning of photography that “approached the camera as a tool that… could be used to make an artistic statement” ( Britannica Academic, 2016). It focused on subject beauty and usually incorporated soft focus rather than a documentation of reality. Jerry Uelsmann is a pioneering photographer that “broke ranks” (Hershberger, 2014) with the previous generation of photographers who advocated for ‘straight photography’. The previous generation had also tried to break away from ‘pictorialist’ photography while also ridiculing it, but Uelsmann “revived and expanded Pictorialist-era techniques” (Hershberger, 2014), mainly through a medium called ‘photomontage’. This form of photomontage was created by combining multiple exposures in the darkroom. Modernist photography (also known as ‘straight photography’) expanded virally, encompassing exemplary forms of sharpness and accurate exposure, but Uelsmann’s concept of the photomontage created a new era of postmodernism for the photographer.

Ara Guler, the famed photojournalist who was donned with the nickname “the Eye of Istanbul ” did not consider himself an artist. “[With] photography being a visual medium,” Guler says, “we press photographers record the visual history of our time. I find that more crucial than creating art. ” Statements such as this raise a great number of questions, and cause for the consideration of the definition of art, the definition of photojournalism, and how photojournalism relates to art.

In his succinct argument, Raoul discusses the potential longevity of photomontage as an important medium for not only its initial political and propagandistic purposes but also as having future use case in psychology, sociology, and even optics. Not only is this argument sparked by the opinion, (although these opinionated critics are never directly named), that photomontage did not have future potential but, importantly, that it had also become too commercial for the avant-garde. Photomontage had begun to gain primary popularity in advertising, used for popular film and even fashion. This widespread use in advertising simplified the respected method and initial motivations for the medium, supposedly diluting critical high art appreciation. Hausmann also touches upon the new critical obsession with the New Objectivity movement in Germany. Is there room for new movements to exist parallel to former expressions, allowing them to both advance or is the latter doomed to only exist as an illustration of a particular historical lens?

Images have an innate propensity to escape the confinements they have been created in and flee to new unfamiliar places. Photographs spore like pollen as they voyage around the globe leaving traces of themselves behind. Arts and all other forms of works about or inspired by “original” images are vessels, carrying in them a soup of new and borrowed ingredients. The various ingredients flavor each other and result in new altered carnations of the referent ingredient/works. Printed texts in literature can capsulate the many aspects of an images existence, giving photos new and sustained life through alternate modes, forms and mediums. Captions, for example, identify and date photos. Captions paired with photographs prevent the photos from being so easily swept into the abyss of meaningless images. Critics who write