Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-Franois Bonhomme

Still XV

35 still Xv Meeting with a Photographer on the Acropolis. He seems to be sleeping, dreaming perhaps, unless he has died, struck down right there by a sun stroke, his head slouched down on his chest. He is perhaps the author of this book. He would have photographed himself, in full sunlight . Here, then, is the heliograph: he wears a hat on his head, but he is still too exposed because the parasol or the reflector behind him is no longer over his head, protecting, it would seem, only other photographic images, already a few reproductions, no doubt. You can make out another camera, much smaller, behind him. And in front of him, on a Delphic tripod, a camera from another age is looking at him, unless it is looking elsewhere, perhaps equipped with a delay mechanism .Theautophotographerhaslaidoutaroundhim,asifhehadsaved them on his ark, an example or copy of every species of thing, not each of the genres of being distinguished in Plato’s Sophist (being, movement and rest, the same and the other), not each of the ontological regions of transcendental phenomenology, not the categories or existentials of Being and Time (Dasein, Vorhandensein, Zuhandensein), but 8 + n “other things.” He thought he had thus divided up physis or the kosmos, the world and then the world of culture within it, if you want to hold onto these later categories, the world or its photographic archive :in8+nkindsof“things.”Hedreamedthatallthesephotographs wouldtakethesethingsbysurprise,inorderoroutoforder,atrandom, there where they happened to be found. He inspected and inventoried them. 1. The mineral and earthen thing, materiality without life, whether ruins or not, whether with or without inscription: all these photos belong in some way to this first class. 2. The vegetal, growing thing: almost all the photos (the only exceptions to this form of physis, to this more or less “natural” form of growth, are a few images of the market or the café, a few fragments 36 • 16 • 37 of frescoes, Zeus seated in the frieze from the Theater of Dionysus, a detail of a funeral stele, the throne of the priest of Dionysus, and the bouzouki player: everywhere else, something is growing). 3. The divine thing (nearly all the statues and the steles, all the temples , a good half the images). 4. The animal thing. But here things get a bit too complicated, for there is the subclass of living beings (the pigeon outside, near the photographer , for example, and the dog inside, just as black, near the sculpture in the Stoa of Attalos [no. 29]) and then the subclass of the dead (of those put to death in truth, killed en masse, but less “natural,” already “merchandise” or “commodities” in the meat or fish market, in the hands of merchants); and then there are the living beings roaming freely (whether “natural,” the pigeon, or “domesticated,” the dog) and living beings in captivity (this other kind of merchandise in the form of baby chicks in cages in the Athinas Market [no. 8]). The dream runs out of steam, but the dreamer goes on. As does his taxonomy. We are only about halfway there. One is reminded of all the classifications of the Sophist (one would be tempted to try them all out, but this has to be given up), all those we encounter even before getting to the mimetic arts, notably, the photographer as fisherman or angler, an image hunter whose art is unclassifiable because it partakes simultaneously , being neither a mimetics nor a sophistics, of all the categories set in opposition to one another by the Stranger: “poetic” or productive arts as opposed to acquisitive arts, acquisition through exchange as opposed to by coercion, coercion by fighting as opposed to hunting, hunting inanimate things as opposed to living things, living things or animals that walk on land as opposed to those that swim, animals that “swim” through the air as opposed to those that swim in water (219c– 220b). The image hunter has all of this in his book, but who would be abletodecidewhetherhisisanartofproductionorreproduction?Just 38 • 17 • 39 trytoadaptallthePlatoniccategorieshere,forexample,the“mimetic” and the “phantasmatic,” just give it a try, and have a field day! 5. The human thing (the thing with a human face, subcategories: artists , a photographer and the specter of an absent painter, merchants and passersby, and then merchants of art or of pastimes, like...