He freed himself from the cloth and straightened up again. He was doing it all wrong, from the beginning. That expression, that accent, that secret he seemed on the very point of capturing in her face was something that drew him into the quicksands of moods, humors, psychology: he too was one of those who pursue life as it flees, a hunter of the unattainable, like the takers of snapshots. He had to follow the opposite path: aim at a portrait completely on the surface, evident, unequivocal, that did not elude conventional appearance, the stereotype, the mask. The mask, being first of all a social, historical product, contains more truth than any image claiming to be “true”; it bears a quantity of meanings that will gradually be revealed. Wasn’t this precisely Antonino’s intention in setting up this fair-stall of a studio?
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(and also)
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In Antonino’s dark-room, strung with films and proofs, Bice peered from every frame, as thousands of bees peer out of the honeycomb of a hive, always the same bee: Bice in every attitude, at every angle, in every guise; Bice posed or caught unawares, an identity fragmented into a powder of images. “But what’s this obsession with Bice? Can’t you photograph anything else?” was the question he heard constantly from his friends, and also from her. “It isn’t just a matter of Bice,” he answered. “It’s a question of method. Whatever person you decide to photograph, or whatever thing, you must go on photographing it always, exclusively, at every hour of the day and night. Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.” But he didn’t say what meant most to him: to catch Bice in the street when she didn’t know he was watching her, to keep her within the range of hidden lenses, to photograph her not only without letting himself be seen but without seeing her, to surprise her as she was in the absence of his gaze, of any gaze. Not that he wanted to discover any particular thing; he wasn’t a jealous man in the usual sense of the word. It was an invisible Bice that he wanted to possess, a Bice absolutely alone, a Bice whose presence presupposed the absence of him and everyone else.
(Difficult Loves and Other Stories)
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