On the face of it death, coldly, methodically, dealt out by a firing squad, precludes an indifferent treatment; such a subject is nothing if not charged with meaning for each one of us. But Manet approaches it with an almost callous indifference that the spectator, surprisingly enough, shares to the full. Maximilian reminds us of a tooth deadened by novocain…. Manet posed some of his models in the attitude of dying, some in the attitude of killing, but all more or less casually, as if they were about to “buy a bunch of radishes.'”

— Bataille on “L’execution de l’empereur Maximilien. 1868/69

Be Quiet
Be Quiet
Be Quiet

Eventually, I stopped understanding how photography works.

Prolix, endlessly digressive, a mass of description, theories that trail off into inconclusiveness, volume after volume, a flood of internal contradiction.

— Rosalind Krauss on John Ruskin, The Optical Unconscious

“another nature … speaks to the camera rather than the eye: “other” above all in a sense that the space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. While it is commonplace that we have some idea about what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all about what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

— Walter Benjamin, Kurze Geschichte der Photographie, 1931