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Authorization also reflects my self-effacement and reappearance returned in its reflection: the reflection of my head and shoulders is replaced by the taped rectangle on the mirror while my torso remains reflected. Despite the gender change between reflected torso and photographed face—which gives the piece an interesting twist—the work has clearly anticipated and incorporated— devoured?—my position and facial image, which seems to acknowledge how it cannot exist without my co-authorization, mirrored and thought. While Venetian Blind insistently inserts the artist’s unfocussed image between camera and ground at an unrepresented arm’s length, this repetition in twenty-four photographs also promises a “want to be there” which appeals to me. In each of these I see the image of Snow bound into his project head-on and by hand, the camera a prosthetic extension of his body. The process binds his sight and material body to the images and their subjects, and to the practice as a whole. Everything else is excluded. While means differ, Venetian Blind, Authorization, and Press all make clear my necessity, anticipation, and incorporation as witness absorbed into Snow’s practice of photography. Consequently, they relay Snow’s answer first, “I promise you, here I am!” and they coax or coerce the same promise and response from me. Coming belatedly to a place that’s been anticipated, I see Snow fascinated by the spectre of the spectator. Repeated so many times, is his promise an unwitting response to the unspoken injunction, “Be there?” Ricoeur felt the promise was a response to an intimate injunction such as “Thou! Be there for me! Love me!” Such an injunction would come from the Other with the force of the Law which must be obeyed. But in Ricoeur’s view, the Law also demands, first, that “Thou shalt not kill.” So in response to Snow, despite his specularization of me and other belated female viewers (which is a gender bender), here I am; I cannot be otherwise. But then, as the initiating artist, here he is, too, but the originality of his action is shown to be a repetition of and desire for the command of the Other, as much as mine is. His demand is pregnant with the desire to have his practice witnessed, while my identical response echoes the desire to be anticipated: we both desire and appeal to the other to be in a scene navigating the plane of representation. So what has happened? “You must” has become “I want”; an injunction by the Other and by you over there has become my desire, but it is yours, too. Coming from the Other and you, my love, the source of my desire as a command is forgotten, and suddenly , I see as other, following Benjamin’s model of mimetic identification or de-differentiation. Metaphorical murder: how does this stand up to the command , “Thou shalt not kill?” Venetian Blind and Authorization are part of Snow’s practice, a practice which offers evidence over a long term for a desire to do something a certain way. If “Here I am, I promise you,” answers and even incor96 FIGURING REDEMPTION Returns on Self-Effacement: The Self-Portrait 97 porates “Be there!” in face of the ironies of Authorization and Venetian Blind, and I am suddenly other, has any violence necessarily occurred or, as Derrida suggested , does any intimation of violence reverse into laughter? Authorization, Venetian Blind, and Press, as well as Snow’s other work under discussion, insist on the circulation of my sight through materialized visual discourse. A modification of mimesis as de-differentiation might be in order, that of notation to be read even though the meanings have been forgotten and which might, on the contrary, relay mimetic identification. In the blurry, wobbly, self-effacing images and reflections returned by Authorization and Venetian Blind, my sight is returned to me as a subject in relay, laughing, and desiring to be. ——— ••• ——— With eyes again lowered, Snow reinvested himself in the holographic self-portrait Egg (1985; figure 12).33 With hands raised nearly to face level and holding two halves of an eggshell, his image emerges in green, ghostly, shimmering light while the raw egg is frozen in its tumble towards a real iron frying pan. The threedimensional illusion of the hologram carves out a deep space from the shadows behind the plate, reciting the chiaroscuro tradition of Renaissance painting in which figures emerge from darkness as though from nothing. Egg is about seeing...

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