What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. - Roland Barthes

What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers — a kind of sclerosis.

[Which means: no depth. Layers of surface — or rather, each layer: a totality. Units]

"People tell you to keep your "courage" up. But the time for courage is when she was sick, when I took care of her and saw her suffering, her sadness, and when I had to conceal my tears. Constantly one had to make a decision, put on a mask and that was courage. — Now, courage means the will to live and there's all too much of that."

I imagine that the essential gesture of the Operator is to surprise something or someone (through the little hole in the camera), and that this gesture is therefore perfect when it is performed unbeknownst to the subject being photographed. From this gesture derive all photographs whose principle (or better whose alibi) is “shock”; for the photographic “shock” consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it.