Catalog of a Collection of Photographs by Gérard Allon in the Judaica Collection of the Harvard library

I draw a basic difference between the daguerreotype, which has been
physically touched by the light which came from the being’s face, and
the photographic print. A photograph on paper, made based on a negative,
is but the graphic reconstruction of a luminous print. It is the
product of a laboratory operation that manipulates the negative image
so as to create a positive image, one that is often reframed, is sometimes
retouched, and is almost always enlarged. The vital energy or,
better yet, the soul of the photographed subject has, in a sense, blurred
during the process. Only the negative that has been exposed to the luminous
waves reflected by the subject retains the living memory of its
presence. The mechanical and chemical reproduction desacralizes the
original image.
Mark this well.
The search for a mimetic pictorial technology of what is currently in
existence is a response to our fathers’ deep faith in material’s taking
on the shapes of the soul that inhabits it. So the discovery of photography
was the fruit of a quest to learn this. Through it I can deepen my
knowledge of man and nature.
As the faithful imprint of the forms of the real, the photographic image
allows me to know beings, landscapes, and things that I have never
personally encountered.
Ask the scientist.
He will tell you that the photograph is the main mediator of his knowledge.
Without it he would not know much about the universe. His understanding
of distant galaxies is based on the images that were taken
by the cameras that he has sent into space. To examine the photograph
of a distant star is to discover the star itself.
Exploration of the inside of the living body is done through the intermediary
of minuscule cameras that the researcher sends off into the
flow of blood in his veins and arteries. Scientific knowledge is obtained
from seeing it.
The explorer, having come back from the heart of unknown continents,
will examine the photographs that he took in order to expand
our understanding of the world. Other seekers of the True will carry
out new explorations, via those same images, without needing to move
physically. To examine an authentic photograph of the Real means examining
the Real itself.
Knowledge of what is infinitely small includes the making and the interpretation
of photographic images. I have seen the result of the impact produced
by the meeting of two protons smashed against one another in a
particle accelerator, on a photographic plate that clearly remembers the
event. Thus I can objectively, which is to say scientifically, draw conclusions
about the life of the material based on the faithful snapshot.
The scientist is the brother of the portraitist and of the daguerreotypist
in particular. Both of them try to give an image of the real such as
it is, outside of me.
The Holographer
Let me explain this to you.
The two-dimensional photograph represents only a shadow of reality.
Remember this: the camera obscura, the most important tool for
knowing the physical world since the Renaissance, was already known
to the Ancients. The luminous reflection projected onto the wall of the
dark room, after having crossed the pinhole, or even the lens of the
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