The Night of Memory: Andreas Embiricos and the 'Optical Unconscious'

Abstract

Within the mad world of photography, it is each time a story of what the eye can see and what it cannot -of what the camera can capture. and of what eludes it. To say this, however, is simply to say that our expenence of photography is always an experience of the eye -of an eye that seeks to see where it does not see, where it no longer sees, or where it does not yet see. At every moment, we are asked to respond to a play of light and darkness -the light and darkness without which the eye could not be what it is, and without which the eye would have no story-and we respond· to the silence of this play by inventing stories, by relating each of these shifting images to several possible narratives.