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

A Somewhat Grandiloquent Voice That Seemed to Want to Attack Me
The holographic representation is the enemy of the portraitist and the
scientist as well as the documentalist. All three swear only by the single-eyed
photographic image, and the stereoscopic image at that.
As for holography, it does not claim to provide an exhaustive response
to the mysteries of the world. It leaves the door wide open to a plurality
of interpretations of the universe. But it involves a frozen representation.
Two Photography Professors Speaking to Each Other
Is the image reported by me evidence of a past event that reportedly took
place in all events, even outside of my presence, or rather was I one of the
players in a ceremony staged by a hidden artist? Am I the witness to an
independent gesture of the transmission tool that I activate?
Only the poacher of images might be able to claim to occupy a point of
view that is different from that of the hunter who has been approved by
the communications ministry.
So the photographer will gain from accepting the fact that his images
are the result of a manipulation of the material shapes reflected by the
real. A photograph is perforce a photograph of something and the photographic
representation that I give of it will perforce be distant from
the essence of the recorded event.
And, lower down in the valley, as we were going into the
city’s inhabited neighborhoods, an old man’s sweet voice
whispered into my ear
Everything is but the representation of a representation, which is itself
the representation of a represention, and this goes on without end. Material
and photography, its twin sister, form the two final stages of the
representation of an invisible, hidden, hypothetical, and absent absolute.
Gérard Allon
Jaffa, June 2009
Translated by Charles S. Fineman
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