...language Is Never Innocent.

I Want A History Of Looking. For The Photograph Is The Advent Of Myself As Other: A Cunning Dissociation Of Consciousness From Identity. Even Odder: It Was Before Photography That Men Had The Most To Say About The Vision Of The Double. Heautoscopy Was Compared With An Hallucinosis; For Centuries This Was A Great Mythic Theme.

The Photograph Is An Extended, Loaded Evidence — As If It Caricatured Not The Figure Of What It Represents (quite The Converse) But Its Very Existence ... The Photograph Then Becomes A Bizarre (i)medium(i), A New Form Of Hallucination: False On The Level Of Perception, True On The Level Of Time: A Temporal Hallucination, So To Speak, A Modest (o)shared(i) Hallucination (on The One Hand 'it Is Not There,' On The Other 'but It Has Indeed Been'): A Mad Image, Chafed By Reality.

Physically, The Ventoux Is Dreadful. Bald, It's The Spirit Of Dry: Its Climate (it Is Much More An Essence Of Climate Than A Geographic Place) Makes It A Damned Terrain, A Testing Place For Heroes, Something Like A Higher Hell.

Every Object In The World Can Pass From A Closed, Silent Existence To An Oral State, Open To Appropriation By Society, For There Is No Law, Whether Natural Or Not, Which Forbids Talking About Things

A Picture Is Never Anything But Its Own Plural Description.