The Paris Review - Fall 2016

Keyboard, 2007.
although, like many elegies, Bartos reinscribes the values he mourns, as his
own photographs evince a sensitivity that makes nostalgia for a previous
moment in the medium beside the point. These images of the displaced origin
of images are again subtle evocations of distinct temporalities: the time
required for a photograph (of an instant) to develop in a chemical bath,
technological developments that supplant that process in historical time.
No photographer ever appears within the photographs, and Bartos’s touch
is so light, it’s almost as if he’s given his camera a moment alone with the
darkroom so that it can pay its last respects.
Marker’s studio is a kind of (light-flooded) darkroom located off a
Parisian boulevard and is as full of formerly futuristic keepsakes as a cosmonaut’s
yard sale—that is to say, Bartos has been preparing, without knowing
it, to shoot Marker’s studio for decades. The studio is both remarkably
cluttered and remarkably clean. There is no trash (although there is plenty
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