A photographer uses the slogan, "The Complete Picture."
Doesn't he realize that his claim--that a photograph could not just play a role in, but somehow perfect (complete) communication (or does he mean perception?)--is like calling some yellow, the "yellowest" of yellows? Every yellow is self-absorbed, but especially the yellowest yellow: they all define themselves by themselves, and the circular reference is meaningless. Such is (pre-?)modern perception, still tacitly, quietly obsessed with Beauty and Truth. So wrapped up in itself as to be unaware of it's shaping of itself: the photograph. An invention of truth-telling, to be certain. As certain as may be.
The photograph fucked modern vision, and their children still fuck each other. They make babies that are beautiful in their own eyes. I'm not sure what difference it would make to visit the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, Mount Fuji, Stonehenge, or Yosemite. I've already seen them all. I could have myself transported theres--hurtled through the air in a tube of metal, faster than you can read a decent book--but to describe it would prove nothing. I'd have to take a picture, just to prove to myself that I'd been there. And then I'd have nothing more than I already do: the world reduced to a click.
The foremost lie told by the photograph is that it might be true. But the photograph sees nothing more than it has created: a frame-severed patch of colours that contains so little of the life it is cut from as to be without life. Relics, of course, are fascinating for the stories they leave to mystery, but they are so far from being history that when the photograph stands in as memory, the dead, no, a bone fragment, captivates the living. Black-and-white is more honest about its shortcomings, at least, because nothing is black and white. The photograph's something can only amount as the photograph is admitted nothing. It is a way of seeing nothing more than its own way of seeing. But seeing, I suppose, is as legitimate a life process as digestion, and farting.
