There exist what we call images of things,
Which as it were peeled off from the surfaces
Of objects, fly this way and that through
the air…
I say therefore that likeness or thin shapes
Are sent out from the surfaces of things
Which we must call as it were their films
or bark.
De rerum natura, Lucreitius, first-century B.C.
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It would not be surprising if the photographic methods which today, for the first time, are harking back to the preindustrial heyday of photography had an underground connection with the crisis of capitalist industry.
“Little History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin, 1931
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From whatever side one approaches things, the ultimate problem turns out in the final analysis to be that of distinction: distinctions between the real and the imaginary, between waking and sleeping, between ignorance and knowledge, etc. -- all of them, in short, distinctions in which valid consideration must demonstrate a keen awareness and the demand for resolution. Among distinctions, there is assuredly none more clear-cut than that between the organism and its surroundings; at least there is none in which the tangible experience of separation is more immediate.
“Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” Roger Caillois, 1937
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The two layers or aspects of objectivity (physical and historical) are interrelated in such a way that they cannot be insulated from each other; the historical aspect can never be eliminated so radically that only the “absolute” physical layer remains.
One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, 1964
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The body itself [is] considered, or invoked, as an infinity of frictions, electrical fields constantly in flux and eventually subject to complete dematerialization. The work employs the historical apparatus which is photography to deploy the poetics of that invisibility which must always lie outside of history, the body’s sense of itself as a part of a continuum indifferent to culture.
“Nonrepresentation in 1988” Beyond Piety: critical essays on the visual arts 1986 - 1983, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, 1988
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Every image teeming with crystalized dots. A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event.
This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.
Underworld, Don Delillo, 1997
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Cosmos comes from kosmein, the Greek word for lining up two sides or faces: two armies, shores, sky and soil, eye and colors, ear and harmonic sound. The fit then results in a battle, a river, the universe, visibilia and music. A sense for this kind of mutually constitutive dissymetric complementarity, for such ontic proportionality, is not included in those axioms that determine the mental topology of modern times.
“The Scopic Past and The Ethics of the Gaze: A Plea for the Historical Study of Ocular Perception” Iven Ilich, first published 2020
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“My point is, that I do want to note, that I think poems can fit in the cracks of lives that are sometimes pressured. I want us to remember that about their magic.”
Elizabeth Alexander, On the Brian Leher Show, WNYC, Nov. 25, 2025
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