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

Nous nous devons à la mort.

Nous nous devons à la mort. 1 Nous nous devons à la mort.¹ We owe ourselves to death. It was this past July 3, right around noon, close to Athens. It was then that this sentence took me by surprise, in the light—“we owe ourselves to death”—and the desire immediately overcame me to engrave it in stone, without delay: a snapshot [un instantané], I said to myself, without any further delay. As the figure of an example, no doubt, but as if it had prescribed to me these words in advance, what immediately flashed before me was one of these photographs: Kerameikos Cemetery, Street of Tombs, Sepulcher (no. 1): on the distended skin of an erection, just below the prepuce ,asortofphalliccolumnbearsaninscriptionthatIhadnotyetdeciphered ,exceptforthepropername,Apollodorus.Andwhatifitwere thatApollodorus,theauthorofahistoryofthegods?Iwouldhaveloved to sign these words; I would have loved to be the author of an epitaph for the author of a history of the gods. I had been traveling in Greece with these photographs ever since Jean-François Bonhomme had given them to me. A risk had already been taken when I promised to write something for the publication of these photographs, and I had already begun to approach them with the familiarity of a neophyte, where fascination, admiration, and astonishment were all bound up together, all sorts of troubling questions as well, in particular regarding the form my text might take. Without knowingit,Imusthavedecidedonthatday,thethirdofJuly,havingnot yet written a word, that the form would be at once aphoristic and serial. Making use in this way of black and white, shadow and light, I would thus disperse my “points of view” or “perspectives,” all the while pretending to gather them together in the sequence of their very separation , a bit like a narrative always on the verge of being interrupted, but 2 also like those funerary stones standing upright in the Street of Tombs (no. 26). Around the one on which the name Apollodorus could be read, I had already noticed the insistence of a serial motif. Back and forth from one to the other, from one column to another and one limit orturningpointtothenext,thisserialityisinmourningorbearsmourning [porte le deuil]. It bears mourning through its discrete structure (interruption, separation, repetition, survival); it bears the mourning of itself, all by itself, beyond the things of death that form its theme, if you will, or the content of the images. It’s not just in the Kerameikos Cemetery or among its funerary steles that this can be seen. Whether wearelookingatthewholepictureorjustadetail,neverdoanyofthese photographsfailtosignifydeath.Eachsignifiesdeathwithoutsayingit. Each one, in any case, recalls a death that has already occurred, or one that is promised or threatening, a sepulchral monumentality, memory in the figure of ruin. A book of epitaphs, in short, which bears or wears mourning [porte le deuil] in photographic eYgy. (Porter le deuil— what a strange idiom: how is one to translate such a bearing or such a range of meaning [portée]? And how is one to suggest that the dead, far from being borne by the survivor, who, as we say, goes into mourning or bears mourning, is actually the one who first bears it, bears it within or comprehends it like a specter that is greater than the “living” heir, whostillbelievesthathecontainsorcomprehendsdeath,interiorizing or saving the departed whose mourning he must bear?) We thus get the impression that what I have ventured to call, without too much impudence , the phallus or the colossus of Apollodorus immediately becomes the metonymic figure for the entire series of photographs collected in this book. But each one of them remains in its turn what it becomes: a funerary inscription with a proper name. Having to keep what it loses, namely the departed, does not every photograph act in effect through the bereaved experience of such a proper name, through 3 the irresistible singularity of its referent, its here-now, its date? And thus through the irresistible singularity of its rapport with or relation to what it shows, its ferance or its bearing, the portée that constitutes its proper visibility? It thus seems impossible, and that’s the whole paradox , to stop this metonymic substitution. There is nothing but proper names, and yet everything remains metonymic. That’s photography: serialitydoesnotcometoaVectitbyaccident.Whatisaccidentalis,for it, essential and ineluctable. My feeling was to be confirmed as it came into sharper focus. Yes, each photograph whispers a proper name, but it also becomes the appellation of all the others. You can already verify...