In the foreword to Bouwe Brouwer’s photobook A Quiet Distance, there is a discussion of the haiku. It is a very fitting term for talking about photography. But I would add another Japanese term: ma, an aesthetic and philosophical concept that can be translated as pause, space, or interval.

Black and white does not eliminate color; it eliminates distraction. It reduces the world to a structure of light, shadow, and texture in which everything acquires a physical presence. In this territory, ma is not an emptiness waiting to be filled, but a space that contains the possibility of looking.

Each photograph establishes a distance, but that separation can never be completely overcome. The book’s black-and-white images make this renunciation visible. By dispensing with color, they compel us to pause over form, the direction of the light, or the details, of which there are many. What becomes essential is no longer the event itself, but the relationship between the elements, as is the case with the photograph on the cover. Nothing extraordinary happens in it, and yet something essential takes place. The image does not demand our attention through a spectacular gesture. Instead, our gaze enters cautiously, moving along the lines, volumes, and areas of shadow, and discovers that the true protagonist is not any particular object, but the tension and complicity that exist between all of them.

There are many other examples of this, such as the girl looking through a metal fence at a peacock with its tail fully spread. The geometric order of the wire mesh and the peacock’s tail contrasts with the girl’s unruly hair. This suggests that some boundaries allow us to imagine or desire what lies beyond them, even though it may not always be possible to reach it.

In this sense, as I have mentioned on other occasions, photographs will always be a possibility. A photograph does not necessarily assert that what it shows is reality; rather, it proposes one possible way of seeing it. Between what stood before the camera and what ultimately appears on the page, there is always a distance. This is why the concept of ma is so pertinent. Between the things that are photographed, there is a space that is not merely physical. It is also a temporal and mental interval.

In A Quiet Distance, this possibility appears again and again. The photographs seem unwilling to explain anything to us immediately. Instead, they place us before something that we must complete ourselves.

I came across the Instagram account of the Belgian Kaat Celis by chance (I’m lying—it was Saint Algorithm), where, after a visit to Arles, she was reflecting on the sheer number of photobooks being published these days and wondering whether we really need quite so many.

After reading through the comments, some supportive, others less so, I felt compelled to join in. I was in Alexandria at the time, lying on a hotel bed, waiting for the sun to sink low enough for me to go out and take photographs. Perhaps that was why I found myself thinking about the need to make books, to take photographs, to leave something behind. About that strange human impulse to turn experience into an object, as though by binding it between covers we might somehow rescue it from oblivion.

I thought about all those photobooks. About the thousands upon thousands of photographs that someone, somewhere, has deemed important enough to print, arrange, sequence and bind. A small declaration against disappearance.

Is it really necessary to publish so many?

Probably not. But this was my response:

My feeling is that if a photobook doesn’t come from deep in your gut, it is better not to publish it.  A body without its entrails is nothing more than a mannequin. Publishing a book without that inner necessity is like speaking just for the sake of speaking. The images may be well exposed, beautifully printed, and impeccably bound, but if they do not come from an obsession, they generate nothing more than a well- made object. And what is merely correct rarely matters. You can tell when a photobook contains lived time, not just time invested. You can tell that the photographer did not  take pictures “ for a book”, but made a book because they could no longer keep those images inside themselves. By contrast, when a project is born the other way around -first the idea of “making a book”, then the search for photographs to justify it- the result is usually cosmetic. An elegant concept, impeccable design, a back-cover text filled whith grand words… and an emptiness at the center. These are books you leaf through once and then forget. These are what I call clone books. And this is not about romanticising suffering, or demanding drama  on every page. It is about giving shape to an experience, about saying, "This is what I saw, and it matters to me that someone else sees it the way I see it." A book like that is not always profitable, nor is it always "good" in absolute terms. But it possesses a rare, singular quality: you feel that something has been given to you. Not information. Not style. Something closer to a shared secret. So perhaps the right question is not, "Is this book ready to be published?" but rather, "Am I ready not to publish it?" If the answer is yes—if you can put it away in a drawer without feeling a knot in your stomach-then perhaps it is better to wait. Or never publish it at all.

I have no idea whether anyone actually made it to the end of my Instagram comment. Matthew Poburyny did. He was the one who encouraged me to write something for Substack.

I am easily consumed by obsessions, so I could no longer lie there in the hotel room (the air conditioning was dreadful anyway). I went instead to the Farouk Café, a short walk away, where I had had breakfast the day before. It was also where I learned that Spain had beaten Argentina. I don’t like football. On that subject, I tend to agree with Borges, who said that football is popular because stupidity is popular. And yet that night I was happy. Stupidly happy.

Back at the café, I reread the comment I had written on Instagram. Suddenly it seemed too harsh. Who was I to say that a photobook without entrails was nothing but a mannequin? What right did I have to decide where another person’s entrails were? To distinguish between a genuine need and an invented one? To determine whether a work had been born out of necessity or merely dressed up as necessity? I realised that I had probably been projecting my own obsessions onto other people’s books. Perhaps what seemed empty to me was full of something I simply did not know how to see.

And perhaps that is the real question: knowing how to see.

But knowing how to see does not simply mean looking more closely. Sometimes it means accepting that we have no idea what we are looking at. It means recognising that our first impression is not a truth, but merely a provisional defence against the unknown.

I think of Conrad. Of Marlow travelling up the river towards the heart of Africa, convinced at first that he is searching for a man—Kurtz—only to discover that he has, in fact, travelled into some dark region of himself, a place he did not know existed. Everything he encounters seems to tell him something about Kurtz. But it also tells him something about himself. The darkness is not only in the place he has reached. It is also in the gaze with which he tries to understand it.

Perhaps this is what happens whenever we judge a work of art. We think we are talking about the work, but often we are really talking about ourselves. About the things we need to find in order to reassure ourselves that our way of seeing is the right one. We call a book empty because it does not contain what we have decided depth should look like. We call a photograph false because it does not conform to our own idea of truth. And perhaps the emptiness is not in the book at all. Perhaps it is in our inability to move beyond its surface. Marlow slowly discovers that looking is not the same thing as seeing. That certain things only reveal themselves when we stop trying to explain them too soon.

Thinking back on my Instagram comment, I wonder if I had done exactly that. Is there something deeply human in this kind of haste? Of course there is. We name things because naming them gives us the illusion that we have understood them. We want to know where other people’s entrails are because then we can separate the real body from the false one, genuine necessity from invented necessity, the living work from the dead. But what if it is not our place to decide. What if the entrails of a work are not located where we expect them to be?Perhaps some are hidden. Perhaps others are invisible to us. Perhaps a work that seems empty or incomprehensible today simply requires us to change before we are capable of seeing it. Maybe the real lesson is not to learn how to judge better, but to learn how to suspend judgement for long enough to allow something to reveal itself. Like Marlow, confronted with something he cannot quite comprehend, we move forward by feel. We look at the river. We look at the mist. We look at faces. We look at photographs. We look at books. And we imagine that we are searching for an answer, when perhaps what we are really searching for is a way of looking that will not deceive us. But such a way of looking does not exist. In the end, knowing how to see means accepting that we are always looking from somewhere. We never see things naked. Everything passes through the filters of memory, desire and fear. The only honesty available to us is to remember, as we look, that we too are part of what we are seeing. So now, when I reread that old comment, I don’t know whether I would take it back because it was wrong. Perhaps I would take it back for a simpler reason: I was too certain that I was right.

I took out my notebook. For a long time I sat there without writing anything, except the date: July 21, 2026. Smoke from a nearby shisha drifted around me, and I began to write:

I came across the Instagram account of the Belgian photographer Kaat Celis by chance (I’m lying—it was Saint Algorithm)…

I left the Farouk Café and walked without any particular destination, as I often do. With my camera. With no plan. Although that isn’t entirely true. I had my good friend Steve Afif in mind, who was born here. Perhaps I had come to Alexandria because of all the stories he had told me.

And because of Cavafy. And Lawrence Durrell, of course. I have come to believe that life is not an escape. It is a search for Kurtz. A search for oneself.

Postscript

I still haven’t answered the question of whether publishing so many photography books is a good thing or a bad thing. I suppose that wasn’t really the question to begin with. Who am I to decide? The questions that truly matter rarely allow themselves to be contained in a single sentence. We spend one part of our lives looking, and another trying to explain why we look. We take photographs because something catches our attention. Because something unsettles us. Because we want to hold on to a scene we already know will disappear. Then, eventually, we begin to arrange those images. And somewhere along the way, we realise that, without knowing it, we have been photographing the same thing for years.

Roberto Bolaño once said that he had the feeling he was always writing the same book. Perhaps photographers do something similar. We photograph the same mystery again and again, from different distances, under different light, pretending each time that we are looking at something new. And then, one day, we make a book. The book, which at first seemed like an answer, becomes another question. What exactly were we trying to save? That is why I am no longer sure I would say that a book has to come from deep within its author’s guts. I still like the phrase. But I have begun to distrust it. There are photographers who work from obsession, and others who work from curiosity. Some need to make a book in order to understand what they have photographed. Others photograph precisely because they are trying to discover whether they have anything to say at all. Some books are born from an urgent necessity. Others emerge from something as apparently insignificant as the desire to look again at an ordinary afternoon. Who are we to rank these needs? The mistake, perhaps, is believing that every work has to justify its existence to us. A photobook can simply be this: an object someone decided to make because they wanted to make it.

At the beginning of this piece, I thought I had an opinion. A fairly well-considered one, I thought. But somewhere along the way I discovered that what I really had was a doubt.

I call my mother before leaving for Prague. The night before, her mouth hurt a lot. She has suffered for many years from trigeminal neuralgia, known as the suicide disease. It is difficult for her to speak. When are you leaving for Copenhagen? I don't correct her. I hear her breathing on the other end of the phone, with that barely concealed effort she makes to sound calm. Tomorrow, I reply. I don't want her to talk too much, because every word she says hurts me too.

When I hang up, I hold the phone in my hand for a moment. Even though I know I'm going to Prague, for a moment I can almost believe that we're really going to Copenhagen, as she said.

I open the notebook I always carry with me and write: "Copenhagen". Just that word. I don't know why, but it comforts me. Maybe because it's the name she chose, the place she thinks I'm going to, and in a way, maybe she's right. Every time a piece of her memory is erased, I too travel to an unknown place.

It had been a long time since I had stepped into a photo booth just for fun—or at least that was my intention. The booth stood beside the train station. It lacked the solid, professional look of the old ones. Its gray curtain resembled a shower curtain. I missed the worn velvet that used to fuel my fantasies.

I stepped inside and sat down in that confessional of faces. The stool was too high. I pulled the curtain shut. One square meter of privacy.

Laugh at yourself, I thought. This isn’t for an official document.

I dropped three coins into the slot. I saw my figure on the screen and, for an instant, I refused to accept the sentence imposed by time. I had the uncomfortable feeling of greeting someone I once was—the self who wandered through Paris many years ago. I think it was there that I last stepped into one of these booths.

Back then, I took a wax pencil from my bag, drew a face on a piece of cardboard I had found in the street, and cut it out with my Swiss Army knife.

I thought something simple and rather ridiculous: we keep stepping into photo booths for the same reason we return to certain songs from our youth or revisit memories of old loves.

But nowadays it is no longer the same. The four flashes no longer fire in sequence, and you no longer have to wait for the photographs to be developed. The strip emerges from the slot almost instantly, and you do not feel the warmth of the drying process when you finally hold it in your hands.

The photo booth in Paris had nothing in common with this one. The one in Paris promised a future; in this one, the future had already been inexorably lived.

I have never seen photography as a simple record of the visible. Rather, I understand it as a form of reading. I feel deeply connected to the words John Updike wrote in his 1965 essay “The Author as Librarian”: “I sense in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the absurd repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable void. Just as physical man has fashioned in his cities an environment whose hostility eclipses that of the natural world, literate man has piled up a counterfeit universe capable of sustaining life.”

This is why the library and photography occupy such closely related places in my imagination. Both arise from a refusal to accept that everything should pass without leaving a trace. One gathers words; the other, light and shadow. Yet both seek to answer the same question: how can we build a habitable space when the outside world seems to dissolve beneath the weight of its own speed?

A pane of glass separates us, as if we were in an aquarium. What I do not know is whether, at that invisible boundary, I am the fish or the visitor. What is clear is that she, sitting in a wheelchair, is on the outside.

I stopped to have lunch at the gas station restaurant. It is preferable to any of those vending machines filled with pre-packaged sandwiches. Earlier this morning I went to a funeral home to offer my condolences to a friend who had lost his mother, and afterward I stopped by the agricultural cooperative to buy a product capable of eradicating the Ibiza beetles invading my vegetable garden. When you have a garden, you get the feeling that Moses is still sending plagues.

Since I did not feel like cooking, here I am, sitting inside the restaurant, watching this woman. I am a photographer because I like to write, and I like to write because I like to photograph. In both pursuits, being a witness rather than an actor, there lies a fascination with the destinies of others, as well as the coming and going of kindred souls.

She is wearing a loose-fitting smock, something like a nurse’s uniform, orange in color—the kind worn by American prisoners. Now that I think about it, it is also the same color as the leaf- and shoot-devouring beetle. On the table there is an empty cup of coffee with milk, a leather wallet, an ashtray with two cigarette butts, and a pack of Winston cigarettes. Despite her nervous tics, she never lifts her eyes from her phone. The tics are constant: she grimaces, shrugs her shoulders, or jerks her head, as though her mind had agreed to communicate only through the body.

As I have said, only the glass separates us, and if it were not there, I could smell her, perhaps brush against her with my hand, feel her tobacco-scented breath, or hear some sound escape her mouth. She does not look neglected in the slightest; her hair is gray and cut in a modern style, somewhat garçonne.

It is not a perfect existence—none is. Neither young nor old, I assume she lives in the nursing home on the other side of the gas station; she only has to cross a pedestrian crossing to get here. I understand. This is her hideaway, the only place where she can smoke in peace, away from more watchful eyes.

Little does she imagine that I am now exposing certain conditions of her life. A yellow awning shelters her, but out there, beneath the midday sun, it is hot. She prefers that to the air-conditioned interior and giving up smoking.

I realize that, as a writer, I am an informer, and as a photographer, too. I also realize that there must always be a gaze through something—a gaze that exorcises, that erupts toward an explosion, that pierces through all walls. Yet the question remains the same:

Am I the fish or the visitor?

My grandfather as a child at Palermo Zoo, Buenos Aires, 1919.

My maternal grandfather had two deeply marked scars across his body. One ran from the base of his neck down to his forearm. The other, perfectly centered and symmetrical, sat in the middle of his chest, as if he had undergone open-heart surgery. The scar on his arm had been caused by a lightning strike. My imagination has always liked to believe that, since my grandfather was a renowned dowser in the region, he also attracted lightning, as though it were the inevitable consequence of such a dangerous profession, much like a miner developing silicosis. And the scar on his chest came from throwing himself off the cliffs of Porto Cristo in his youth, scraping his chest against a rocky ledge. Certainly two good reasons to have died. But he died from something far more discreet, almost offensively banal: time. That enemy without scars.

It always intrigued me that his body told a different story from the one he himself narrated. He said the lightning had been neither a punishment nor a miracle, but rather a brief conversation with the Most Holy Christ of Manacor. That the electricity had passed through his arm the way someone pounds impatiently on a door. And when he spoke of the leap into the sea from the cliff — one that could easily have been fatal — there was no arrogance in his words, only a restrained laugh, as if youth were a luminous mistake that still tickled him.

And yet, at night, seated beside the heated table in the dining room with the brazier glowing beneath it, he was simply a man who read. But he was a very peculiar reader, he never read novels, poetry, or essays. He read only encyclopedias. He used to say that encyclopedias were like a skein of yarn from which infinite threads emerge, inexhaustible in their possibilities. Sometimes I watched him open those enormous volumes at random. I was fascinated by that way of reading — plotless and somewhat anarchic — moving through countries, extinct animals, forgotten battles, and the names of astronomers no one pronounced anymore. My grandfather read the way children explore: without method and full of wonder, turning life into a continuous invention.

When I was a child, I would sit beside him in silence. It was on one of those days that he told me about the lightning strike. I was stunned, of course. I pictured his scars then: two thick worms living beneath his skin. “Shall we look up what lightning is?” he asked me. I nodded, despite already knowing what lightning was — at least visually. He got up to fetch the volume for the letter L. I think it was the Larousse encyclopedia, though I cannot remember exactly; he also owned the Espasa-Calpe and the Britannica. He began searching for “Lightning.” When he found the entry, he ran his finger along the definition with an almost ceremonial slowness. Then, after reading three pages silently to himself in a nearly inaudible murmur, he closed the book and said with complete naturalness: “It doesn’t fall. The sky decides to touch the earth.” It did not sound like a mystical statement, but rather a technical observation — as though he had seen the mechanism from the inside.

Over the years I came to understand that his way of reading, beyond any intellectual concern, was a way of being alive and of traveling. He himself could never do so, not even back to his birthplace, Buenos Aires, which became the invisible scar — the most painful one — of his life. The most important and obvious scars are often the hardest to see and explain; they can wither a man for the rest of his days. But that is another story, one I will tell another time.

Me at Palermo Zoo, more or less in the same spot where the previus photo was taken.

For me, what matters most in that brief scene between Van Gogh and the student in Kurosawa’s film is the line: “I can’t waste time talking to you.” Here, Van Gogh, with his almost feverish determination, cuts straight through the student’s eagerness and leaves him motionless. Van Gogh knows that light does not wait; every second is different from the one before. How could he speak when the world changes so quickly?

Sometimes I’ve imagined how the dialogue might continue:

Student: And doesn’t it hurt?

Van Gogh: Painting hurts more… When I speak, the images slip away from me. When I paint, I return to myself.

I’m in Petra, having a coffee, grateful for the coolness of the marble table. I read one of the local newspaper headlines: The solar eclipse on August 12 drives up restaurant bookings. I fear that half of Europe will come to see the eclipse, as if the sky needed an audience to complete its cycle. The protagonist of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain, saved his life by knowing that a solar eclipse was about to occur and left the magician Merlin looking ridiculous, disarmed by the precision of a calendar.

I think the eclipse will be photographed millions of times. Yet no image will contain the silence that precedes it. None will capture the slight drop in temperature, the almost imperceptible change in collective breathing. A photograph freezes things, but the eclipse is an insignificant passage.

Perhaps photography is not an attempt to stop time, but rather an acceptance that we too are a brief and insignificant shadow. A moment aligned between light and something greater. And in that alignment we discover that being here—simply being—is already enough.

The creation of a photobook is both an intellectual and an experiential activity. Its primary tool is, of course, photographic language—but not just any language; rather, one that is as refined and appropriate as possible, inherently suited to the situations being narrated. As is well known, a photobook creates a new, unexpected world that seeks to move the sensitive reader, just as it must first have moved its author. If the creator is not emotionally engaged with their work, the reader will be even less so, since the author is the first reader of their own creation.

Sequencing, then, becomes the true internal pulse of the photobook. It is not merely about arranging images according to a chronological or thematic criterion, but about constructing a visual syntax capable of sustaining an experience. Each photograph ceases to be an autonomous unit and instead becomes part of a chain of meaning, where what comes before and after alters its interpretation. Thus, an image is not only what it shows, but also what it recalls from the previous one and what it anticipates in the next.

To sequence is to decide what is revealed and what is concealed, when the narrative should intensify and when it is best to offer a pause. As in writing, rhythm is decisive: some pages function as accents, others as silences. Repetition, variation, and contrast are fundamental resources that allow the author to shape the reader’s experience, guiding them without imposing a single interpretative path.

In this sense, Chaos and Contradictions by Davide Bernardi takes on an almost cinematic quality. The transition from one image to another generates associations, tensions, and resonances that do not exist within the photographs individually. A gaze may find its answer several pages later; a gesture may acquire new meanings when confronted with another that initially seems distant. The sequence does not illustrate—it constructs.

In this way, sequencing reveals itself as a deeply conscious act, where intuition and thought are in constant dialogue. It is here that the author ceases to be merely a photographer and becomes the editor of their own world, the architect of a sensitive experience. And it is in this delicate balance—between initial emotion and reflective construction—that the photobook reaches its true power: not simply to show, but to make one feel through time and order.

During the first years of the twenty-first century, my photography was more conceptual. I was more interested in the idea than in the image itself. I began to pay attention to the residues of the photographic process: discarded test prints, useless fragments, leftover material. In this waste I found an unexpected power. They were images without function, without commission, without a clear identity; fragments of a visual machinery that normally remains invisible.

The series Ganas de fabular was born out of this interest and was built from a minimal gesture that is, at the same time, deeply political: reusing the remnants of ID photo strips—those strips where only the empty space remains that once held a face—to compose a collage that partially covers the image of a figure seen from behind. In this crossing of absence and presence, a reflection on identity, memory, and the impossibility of fully fixing the subject in the image takes shape.

ID photographs are, by definition, functional images. They do not seek to tell a story, but to certify an identity: name, document, control. By using only the leftovers, the fragments in which the face is no longer present, the work subverts this instrumental use of photography. Emptiness becomes the protagonist. What is normally discarded—the margin, the residue, what is useless for identification—becomes poetic material here. Identity is no longer affirmed; it is suspended.

The superimposition of these strips over a figure seen from behind introduces a tension between anonymity and figuration. The character does not show their face: they cannot be recognized, they cannot be fully captured by the gaze. In a sense, this is a “body without identity” onto which layers of others’ absences are imposed. Each empty fragment functions as a trace of someone who was once there but is no longer. The result is a body composed of other absent bodies, an identity constructed out of what is missing.

The title, Ganas de fabular (The Desire to Fabulate), steers the reading toward the realm of imagination. Where there is no face, where there are no features that allow recognition, the temptation to invent arises. The viewer fills in the gaps: projecting stories, possible biographies, lives we do not see but intuit. The work does not offer a closed narrative; it proposes a space for fiction.

Formally, the almost cartographic mesh of the collage evokes a city seen from above, an urban network of streets and grids. This reading suggests another layer: identity as territory, as a space traversed by multiple invisible trajectories. The individual is no longer a stable unit, but a crossing of lines, remnants, and stories that touch without ever fully merging. The subject, like the city, is constructed through the superimposition of layers, times, and absences.

Taken as a whole, Ganas de fabular proposes a poetics of residue and of the gap. Where traditional imagery seeks to fix a face and secure an identity, the work shifts attention toward what is not seen, what was lost, what was never fully present. Fabulation here is not an escape, but a necessity: faced with the impossibility of fully knowing the other, all that remains is to imagine them. And in that act of imagining, the viewer also discovers themselves, projecting their own desire to fabulate onto the void.

Yesterday, as I was looking out the window, still halfway between sleep and wakefulness, letting myself be crossed by that slow transformation, I saw two hares by the vegetable garden. Days earlier I had noticed they had been nibbling at the newly planted cabbages. I had blamed them in silence, with that severity one reserves for small losses, but when I saw them there, suspended in the newborn light, all reproach dissolved. I have known them since they were two small leverets, and they are inseparable, always together.

The light was settling over the garden. The green was not yet fully green, and the damp earth exhaled that dark scent that reminds us everything grows from below. I thought of the cabbages, of the effort of planting them, and then of the hares’ need, as legitimate as my own need to contemplate that moment. Curry, as always, stood by my side. He too saw the hares and was restless. You want to run a little, I whispered to him. I went to the door and opened it without making a sound. Curry shot out toward the hares. But they reacted as one: two tawny flashes that dissolved into the green wheat.

It is a game; I know Curry will never catch one of those hares. First because he doesn’t have the speed of a podenco, and second because hunting is not in his genes. He is a Golden Retriever. Still, he runs with absolute conviction, as if for those few seconds he were granted the illusion of being a greyhound. I watch him from the doorway, without calling him back, without hurrying the outcome, respecting his small morning rite as well. After a few meters Curry stops, sniffs the ground attentively, turns around himself once or twice, bewildered and satisfied at the same time. He has fulfilled his role. He lifts his head and looks at me, his tongue just barely out, his single bright eye, as if asking whether he has done well. I smile at him. You always do well, I think.

He comes back slowly. When he reaches my side, he rests his muzzle against my leg and looks once more at the garden, now still, reconciled. Morning has finished opening itself. The colors have found their final place and the day, without grand gestures, settles in. I close the door carefully. Inside await the coffee, the tasks, the time that moves forward. But something of the trembling of the hares, of Curry’s impossible run, of that silent truce between the wild and the domestic, stays with me. As if the day, by beginning this way, had decided to be a little lighter.

My bookplate is a hare hiding in a little wood. I have used it for many years. When I was small and ill in bed, my mother used to read me La Fontaine’s fables. La Fontaine’s hares were cunning, fearful, always on the verge of flight, and yet there was in them a fragile dignity that moved me. Perhaps that is why, over the years, I chose that image to mark my books, as a way of recognizing myself in all that hides. The characters in La Fontaine always keep to one maxim: to be happy, one must live hidden.

This photograph of the interior of an abandoned industrial building was taken in Mexico and is part of the photobook Malparaíso. In it we see a floor covered with rubble, hanging cables, stained and graffiti-covered walls. In the middle of this scene there is a human silhouette cut out in black in front of a window. The figure is marked by multiple bullet impacts concentrated in the chest, small points of light that pierce the darkness of the body. There is no blood, no face, no identity—only the trace of violence. It is not an image that feels sensationalistic. Personally, I do not like explicit violence in photographs, except when they are purely documentary and denounce an event.

But this image, without being explicit, speaks directly to the contemporary experience of many countries, where armed violence has ceased to be an exceptional event and has become a constant, almost structural presence. The silhouette functions as an anonymous body, a symbolic substitute for thousands of victims whose names do not always make it into official records or public memory. By not showing a real body, the photograph avoids morbidity and shifts attention to the void, the absence.

The window behind the figure is a key element. Through it we perceive the exterior, an apparently calm, illuminated landscape, with trees and open sky. This contrast underscores a fundamental tension: violence occurs within everyday spaces, while life continues outside. The window becomes a boundary between two realities that coexist without fully touching: that of harm and that of normality. In this sense, the image suggests how violence has become integrated into the social landscape.

The bullet holes in the silhouette recall the shooting targets used in police or military training. This reference suggests a dehumanization of the body, reduced to a target, to a surface on which death is rehearsed. The figure has no sex, age, or recognizable features; it could be anyone. Precisely this is its symbolic power: the victim is collective.

The deterioration of the space reinforces this reading. Material abandonment reflects social and institutional abandonment. There are no signs of protection, justice, or reparation. The graffiti, dirty walls, and debris on the floor seem to say that violence is not an isolated accident, but part of a broader process of rupture in the social fabric.

This photograph does not document a specific crime, but a condition. It does not accuse a concrete perpetrator, but it confronts the viewer. It forces us to look straight at a reality that often becomes invisible through repetition or fatigue.

Ultimately, the image functions as an act of memory. Where there are no bodies, there are marks; where there are no names, there are forms. The photograph insists that violence leaves traces, even when one tries to erase it. And in doing so, it turns the empty space into a witness.

In today's world, there can no longer be innocent or light-hearted photographs. Every image, however minimal or mundane it may seem, is imbued with a web of meanings, intentions and possible interpretations that strip it of its simplicity. The camera is no longer just a technical device; it is a cultural, political and emotional intermediary. Taking photographs today means taking a stand, even if the gesture is unconscious.

Tarr works with duration: long takes, parsimonious movements, scenes that seem not to progress. In this context, the window concentrates a silent tension. Separation and contact at once, it demarcates inside and outside without resolving them. The characters appear to be in existential quarantine: they see the exposure, the rain, the street, but they do not cross the threshold, and when they do, the camera always follows their hunched backs. There is an ethics of stagnation, a recognition of the limits of human action in a universe governed by impersonal forces—weather, economy, history—that manifest themselves as a moral climate. “How about a good fuck like in the old days?” a prostitute asks the doctor—one of the characters in Sátántangó—but he merely lights a cigarette and leaves the way he came.

The window also returns a double image. It is transparent and reflective: in looking outside, the characters also see themselves. There is no explicit psychologism, but there is a tacit self-contemplation. The glass is a surface of doubt. What they observe— is it the world, or their own exhaustion? Tarr’s melancholy is not romantic but material: mud, wind, slow footsteps, domestic objects. Looking out the window implies accepting that existence is composed of minimal repetitions and that meaning, if it appears at all, does so out of sync.

There is also a political dimension. These bodies that look and do not act embody the experience of dispossession: lives suspended on the margins, where choice has been eroded by necessity and the only beings that seem free of chains are animals. Prolonged duration forces the spectator to share the immobility, turning them into another character who looks from their own “window”—the screen. Cinema becomes specular: we watch those who watch, trapped in the same circuit of contemplation.

Ultimately, Béla Tarr’s windows interrogate the status of hope. There is no promise on the horizon, but neither is there pure nihilism. Rather, there is a radical attention to the present, to what remains when progress has collapsed as a myth. The characters look to make sure there is still an outside, that the world has not disappeared entirely. And perhaps in that persistence of the slow, obstinate gaze lies the minimal form of dignity that Tarr’s cinema recognizes: to keep seeing, even when nothing changes.

Before, and not so many years ago, photography was epistolary and became a small miracle when you received it. Even if an image was seen in the pages of a newspaper fresh off the press, it did not entirely lose its mystery, because it preserved the traces of the process; what one saw had crossed distances and material mediations to finally rest before our eyes. This also happened when you developed film or took it to the photo lab on the corner. There was a wait. And when you opened the envelope from the lab or removed the prints from the darkroom, each photograph was a kind of letter you sent to yourself. It did not just show a face, a gesture, a landscape: it carried with it the smell of chemicals, the white edge of the prints, the small imperfections. A drop, a scratch, a slight overexposure became accents, marks of life. Nothing was instantaneous; everything was traversed by promise, by the uncertainty of whether the image had come out sharp or had been lost forever.

Today, by contrast, immediacy has almost completely erased that process. However, I believe that the photobook has come to fill the void left by epistolary photography. Faced with the dizzying circulation of social networks, the photobook proposes a pause and recovers slowness, the same slowness with which family albums used to be filled. Kundera suggests that slowness is related to pleasure and to memory: the more slowly we live an experience, the more deeply it becomes inscribed within us. The photobook, then, not only slows down the circulation of photography, but transforms our position as spectators. It turns us into readers of images who advance at a chosen rhythm, not an imposed one. Childhood memories are like that too, slow. Who doesn’t remember them? We ran and ran without stopping, but time passed slowly, the day was endless, and there was no hurry or desire to bring anything to an end.

I don’t know whether it is age or simply a fatigue in the face of the demand for immediacy, but I am increasingly drawn to slowness. So much so that even when driving on a highway I rarely exceed 90 km per hour. It irritates others; some overtake me with an impatient gesture or by honking the horn, as if they were in a hurry to get somewhere that, I suspect, is not really waiting for them with much urgency either.

Rembrandt, already at an advanced age and perhaps to the rhythm of a tired heart, drastically reduced his color palette. It has always been said that this was due to the psychophysiological effects of aging. But John Gage, in his book Colour and Meaning, points to the possibility that Rembrandt simply wanted to develop a chromatic style like that of the great masters of classical antiquity.

Rembrandt. Self-portrait with palette and brushes, circa 1660–1665. Kenwood House, London.

Just as Rembrandt returned to the great masters, so we must return to the analog and, ultimately, to slowness. Returning to the analog does not mean renouncing the digital, but recognizing its limits and accepting that not everything must occur under the sign of haste. Like Rembrandt refining his palette, stripping it of excess to reach an essence, we too are called to simplify, to choose.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: that uploading this to Substack was just a simple click of a button and that in less than a second you already had it in your email inbox. And you’re right. That lightning-fast click seems to contradict everything above, but it isn’t about abolishing speed; it’s about deciding what we do with it. We are not going to disappoint any stopwatch, believe me. Slowness enriches us and gives us a greater capacity to explore what is around us.

What if it had been a photographer who had collected Democritus' eyes? The photographer would then realise that every photograph is a pact with the surface and would begin to doubt his craft. He would suspect that every image he had taken before was an agreed deception, a concession to brightness, to appearance.

One night, in a gesture that I would not know whether to call homage or betrayal, that same photographer would place one of the eyes in front of the camera and the other in its own closed socket. For a moment, he would understand that seeing is not knowing, and that every true image requires a form of blindness, like the one Borges had.

Heraclitus—in addition to his famous aphorism about the river—also said that the most beautiful world was a pile of rubbish scattered at random.

Heraclitus was undoubtedly one of the first to have a magnetic relationship with the landscape, one of the first to know that looking slowly was a way of finding emotions.

In Martin Amis' latest book, this is what one must do: look slowly, since the images in Reverie are not offered as events or as evidence of something external to them; rather, they suspend time, persevering in the minimal, in what barely happens.

It is this 'barely happening' that truly moves us and shifts our gaze to the margins, to areas where perception tends to relax. The book conveys the presence of nature, not as a setting, but as a living subject on which the wounds inflicted by human beings are burned into; it shuns emphasis and seeks the residual because that is where the imagination is nourished, where the gaze aspires to penetrate that unprotected nature, always besieged by us.

Edited by Photo Editions https://photoeditions.pub/

Perhaps that is why no one makes lists of rereadings, because they force us to admit continuity in a world that rewards discarding. Rereading is resisting the idea that everything must be replaced.

Taking stock of rereadings would ultimately mean accepting that reading is not a straight line, but a spiral. We return to the same point only in appearance: in reality, we are a little higher or a little lower, with the certainty that some books are never finished, because they continue to grow as we change.

These are just a few re-readings related to photography that have somehow surprised me again, but there are many more: William Henry Fox Talbot, Enrique Meneses, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Paul Klee, Francesc Torres, Fernando Pessoa, Peter Puklus, Matt Stuart, Martin Parr, Anders Petersen, Mark Power, Nick Meyer, Alison McCauley, Schutmaat, Sternfeld.

Rowan berries have been placed on the table as decoration. Having been frozen by the frost, they have entered the warmth of the home.

The berries, resigned, accept the transition. They will never harden in the same way again. Something in their pulp has already given way. The same is true of those sitting around the table: grey-haired parents with their children begin to absorb the colour of the berries.

After a while, after briefly reviewing his life, Fausto looked again at the Toyota Corolla. This time he seemed to caress it with his eyes.

“Do you know what my wife likes most?” he asked as he flicked the cigarette butt to the ground and crushed it under his heel.

“Impossible to know.”

“That I masturbate her with my foot.”

Fausto drifted off for a moment; perhaps he was taking a mental bath in his wife’s vulva, imagining his fingers beginning to move with intent, pressing between the lips, slowly parting them, brazenly brushing the clitoris while trapping between two fingers—like one of his paintbrushes—the swollen button that grew wetter with every back-and-forth. His confidence didn’t unsettle me; it was almost obvious.

“Painting and masturbating my wife are two ways of being alive: perseverance and distraction, dream and search… Life gushes out of you… I’ll never manage to free myself from this vocation for dreaming and living… But you didn’t come all this way for me to give you a sermon on how to arouse erogenous zones with a foot… Take whatever photos you want.”

Half an hour was enough for me to take a dozen photographs. As I was saying goodbye, I set my phone on the ground in front of him; I wanted to call a friend. When I left, the sun had fallen like a guillotine behind the hills, dominating from beginning to end that entire universe under an incipient darkness, clearing the way for a new day. The symphony of cicadas had ended, without applause.

If Fausto didn’t have legs, he would walk on his hands, I’m sure of it, I mused as I headed for the train station. His eyes seemed to recognize the paths of a lost paradise, still open in dream. We feel a sacred enthusiasm for all those things that bind us.

When I was about to get off the train, one of my shoe soles had left a small yellow stain on the carpet. I stopped for a second, my foot suspended in the air, as if doubting my own weight, as if that mark were a vestige I should not erase. I looked at it closely: a blurred oval, scarcely a flower of dust tinged with light. It could have been pollen, but it was dry pigment, dragged along unintentionally from Fausto’s studio, stuck to the sole like a kind of silent signature. It had something of a relic about it, of magical residue; in its simple presence it condensed all the intensity of that afternoon. The earth, the cigarette, the almond trees, the raw confession, the foot that gave pleasure and painted worlds. All of that, reduced to a stain.