Page 39 - Milano Periferia

seeing and his culture: hence the distinctive character of the "sign", the
quality leap conceded to its continuous creativity. As Benjamin’s genius
has clarified for us in memorable pages, the creativity of photography
lies in its abdication to the fashion: the capacity to frame within the tota-
lity of the cosmos any preserve-jar whatever does not count as much as
that of representing some of the human contexts in which such totality
is present.

Being able to say something on reality then makes seem vague and out-
dated the purpose - that is still firm in some, fortunately only a few -
to give it back to us wholly on the slide. Quite different is the spirit of this
text of photograms which I would suggest to "interdiscipline" fans and
to reformist students as an original alternative to a type of semiology not
well-enough considered.

In it, moreover, I find the confirmation of theories which I think have been,
by now, firmly and undiscussedly acquired. That is why I consider it exem-
plary under different aspects.

First of all it offers itself as a bare document. It avoids any calligraphic
exercise, any tracery coming from the dimness of the unconscious. The
images unroll limpidly, with an almost casual limpidness, so that each of
us could have fixed them. Completely deprived of that "aura", which has
often and ambiguously related photography to art, altering its function and
delaying its democratization, the images refuse both a stereotyped setting
and the choice of the exceptional or the exotic, the unique, the unrepeat-
able in a remonteness flattenin space and time.

Did not Benjamin write in "A Short History of Photography", when he
compared Atget’s photographs to those of the "crime spot", that every
point of our towns is a crime spot ? Which is tantamount to defining the
new function of the photographic image as a proving document of the
historical process: approaching objects and persons to the sight, equaliz-
ing them to their species, ready to catch the event and its sudden pheno-
menal appearance which annuls any stereotypization, any proctetive mask.
In short fixing the anonymous appearance in order to disclose its
significance.

In the second place, I want to point out that the book also pursues an
aim inherent in any research which does not end with itself and with its
rarefied language: this aim consists in serving the truth, not only anthro-
pological but also, as I have already said, social, without betraying it.

This research has been carried out through an unexceptionable technique,
which has re-lived and absorbed the lesson of the great masters: from
the Atget of the various Rues des Saules, Bonaparte, Lion, de Fourcy, St.
Peres, Garancière, St. Jacques, St. Vincent, Montmartre, Mouffetard, de
Verneuil, of Place St. Sulpice and of Boulevard St. Michel to the Klein of
the sharp views of Rome and Moscow, from the Sander of the portraits
of professions and trades to the Strand of "A village", from Cartier Bres-
son to Masclet, to Guillot, etc.