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

lets us see of a just disappeared event, he provides us with an opinion.
He is part of the action and often even influences it.
The documentalist’s main problem is to create the documents that he
believes in, those that will give him the feeling of having played the
role necessary for the unfolding of the action in which he takes part.
But he knows that in order to exist, his images will have to be selected
by editors, historians, conservators, and other key actors in the final
representation of the event. So it will be necessary to reach a compromise
with them.
In this sense I agree with the holographer when he says that the photographic
image is partial.
The Portraitist
It’s people like you who hijack photography from its mission. Just as
the strong photographic portrait is the one that provides the face with
all of the scratches generated by time, avoiding greasepaint and posing,
and just as the social photograph must reduce the operator’s manipulating
intervention to a minimum. The framing will be neutral. The
lens that is used will be transparent and not distort. The moment the
shutter is released will bring all of the data from the scene into a
unique, masterly image.
The Photojournalist
Can knowledge come from murder?
In order to prove the rightfulness of what he is looking for, the scientist
dissects, deconstructs, intervenes, provokes, and finally kills the living
thing he has observed.
Like him the photographer selects, composes, waits, provokes, releases
the shutter, and kills the movement of the photographed scene.
What we call photographic truth is only a plastic interpretation of a
physical event that has just passed.
Slightly before dawn, the Academy’s president put an end to the dispute.
The crowd began its slow descent toward the heart of Jerusalem,
taking the innumerable paths that run all around Mount Scopus.
Some walkers were silent while others were trying to catch their neighbors’
attention. Among the innumerable voices that surrounded me,
some have remained in my memory.
One Teenaged Voice, As If Speaking to Himself
If, in the final analysis, the photograph does not represent the Real but
is content with giving a formal interpretation of it, the science based
on these photographic images would then only be a dependency of
poetry and philosophy. It would gain from mistrusting its own sufficiency.
Might there be room for a science of nature that would not just be materialist?
Another Voice
The scientist is the brother of the portraitist and of the daguerrotypist
in particular. Both of them claim to provide an image of the real as it
is. The only thing is that the features of the face are fugitive just as nature
is steeped in a permanent movement that seems to drag it heaven
only knows where.
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