[1918 1958] influential French film critic and film theorist
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Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.
The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast... [But] the cinema realizes the paradox of moulding itself on the time of the object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well.
A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.
Photography can strip from the world that spiritual dust and grime with which our eyes have covered it.
[The photograph] is the object itself… [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.
All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.
The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process... rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.
Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.
Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image.
