Wednesday, October 27, 2010

The image is the object itself

Lance Pearce, Untitled (2010), Photography.
                


'Painting is, after all, an inferior way of making likenesses, an ersatz of the processes of reproduction. Only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need that man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation ... The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.' 

Andre Bazin, 'The Ontology of the Photographic Image,' What is Cinema?, trans, Hugh Gray, Berkley University of California Press, 1967, 14.
    


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