The Paris Review - Fall 2016

identical to himself ? How do you remember one of the great philosopherartists
of memory?
Adam Bartos’s photographs of Marker’s Paris studio offer a powerful
answer; they are beautiful portraits from which the subject has gone missing.
In Bartos’s photographs, people are everywhere and nowhere. The first
of his books I encountered was International Territory (1994), a series of
images of the UN building in New York. Emptied of people, the architecture
is left to dream its modernist dream of a future that never arrives. In
many of the images, a distinctly postapocalyptic feeling obtains: without
a speaker atop it, the General Assembly podium appears like a giant tomb;
the subtle signs of aging infrastructure—cracks in the walls, peeling paint—
make the building look less momentarily vacated than abandoned. I can’t
quite decide, for instance, whether the coat hanging in the photograph
of the Russian Translation Service indicates that someone is working just
beyond the frame or whether the garment has been hanging there for years.
The healthy- looking office plants that appear in several images look less like
reassuring signs of habitation than ominous indications that nature is starting
to reclaim the buildings of a depopulated city. And the single rose in a vase
at the center of the image of the Delegates Dining Room—is that freshly cut
or plastic? Bartos’s photographs are full of such ambiguities, undecidable
International Territory: Room S1446, Russian Translation Service, 1989–94.