I mumbled through the rooms at Jeu de Paume, queuing at every picture, whilst the rain hit the December

of Paris outside. As everybody else I was walking and gazing and pondering and moving next. Small monochromatic frames on the wall dictated the rhythm, lines of people slid slowly along the walls, leaving empty the centre of the room. It was Diane Arbus hunting trophies we were observing, what remains from her quest for difference, the best thing. Diana is the Roman goddess of hunting. Diane is a hunter of instants, collector of singularities, archaeologist of the unseen which she looks for digging into the dusty streets of New York and the dirty rooms of existences back-stages.
That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life... 1 I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.

Diane, the hunting goddess, from dyeus, divine, and dies, day, she who hunts for the divine in the everyday, looking for the unseen to bring to everybody the proof of the falling trees, since this is what her shots are,
proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is 2 boggling. You can turn away but when you come back theyll still be there looking at you

She makes things exist as instants, instances of an impersonality which is no longer controlled by the will and consciousness of the photographer or the photographed, but rather emerges as a gap, at the
point between what you want people to know about you and what you cant help people knowing about you.

The difference from which this gap emerge through the repetition of the photographic act, is what you sought in the greasy dressing rooms of transvestites, or in the coldly distant images of nudists quietly lying on their sofas, the flaccid flesh blurring with the sofas skin, smoking a cigar just like the Mexican dwarf on the bed with hat and moustaches, looking at the camera with the involuntary comicalness of an African dictator. Instants, instances of the irreducible difference of life is what you were after in the dusty streets of New York where adults would look back at you with empty diffidence, in-diffidence, suspended between the atavistic fear of you stealing their soul, and the void which the camera lens was reflecting of their image. Hopeless, more naked when dressed, the adult self-confidence would disappear in the hesitant defence of a flat mask, or an archaic smile. So were the kids, who such masks willingly wore, pretending to be adult, reproducing a self-confidence which, now fully true because explicitly false, did not let that tragic opacity of adults emerge. Smoking cigarettes, launching grenades, unable to conceal their pulsating vibrancy. And what about those heavily made-up old women, their too pretending to be adult, shifting confident posing for the thickness of mascara, lipsticks so purple it can be seen through the monochrome, the artificial smoothness of the chalked skin at the service of aesthetic spontaneity, oxymoronic practices whose ineluctable end their home-pictures reveal, when their painted flesh is caught resting heavily in private armchairs, abandoned into them with that ancestral tiredness which only to old people belongs. So similar they are to those transvestites applying blusher on their cheeks in badly lit dressing rooms, or the circus-performer showing his multiple needles piercing his skin, same exhaustion in the gaze, same no-longer concealed awareness that the masks are gone, showing nonetheless that behind a mask is only a new mask, that it is a relentless change of masks what we are, that one can only ever truly open oneself to ones own un-openness:
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

Badly lit are also the interiors of those Russian dwarfs, whose sad dignity while cooking potatoes resonates in the room, or the living room where the giant is unable to stand, whilst his mother looks at him in worried amazement, or the faces of the American patriots standing for they no longer remember what.
1 2

November 28, 1939, paper on Plato, senior English seminar, Fieldston School in response to request for a brief statement about photographs, March 15, 1971

If you were looking through all these border-lines for the possibility to narrate the unseen, to let the difference emerge, this is not what you found. The gaze of the couple going for a Sunday picnic is the same of James Brown resting after a show, the same of the old nudist couple standing in front of you in the tiny bedroom, the same of this transvestite smoking with hair curlers on, the same of Susan Sontag thinking about something on the bed, the same of those twins shining in front of you, the same of yourself, half-naked and pregnant, staring at yourself at the mirror. Like an unwitting Modigliani it was an empty, archetypal gaze you managed to uncover, behind which, through which, the impersonal ground of a life can be glimpsed, in its eternal boredom, its infinite purposelessness. Like an unwitting Mir your repetitive series gradually dug away any residue of subjectivity, stripping the flesh off the bones of your sub-jects. Looking for difference you found the incessant, differential repetition of an impersonal Being flashing through the empty orbits of your subjects eyes. No difference, then, between all of them and this blind couple gently hugging on the bed or rather, the difference is that the same subterraneous Being flows freely out of the couples white bulbs, free to roam and pulsate, free from the self-conscious effort of the other subjects faces. Then is no chance that the most powerful explosion of this impersonal life is in the series of joyous shots of adults and children affected by Downs' Syndrome playing in the park. Here, hopelessness is gone, the expression is finally liberated from the constraints of the face, the sheer vitality speaks again of the sheer force of the impersonal. No surprise then whether you chose to name those pictures Untitled. Their utter impersonality does not allow for a title to be imposed. No room for romanticising here though. No piety either. The sheer vitality of these playful shots is not opposite to the deep, existential boredom to which the other shots seemed consigned. They are both manifestation of the eternal plenitude of an impersonal Being, a life which in Untitled sparks more vividly because it is no longer sought to be tamed, and instead of finding its way through the crack of the gaze is now fully actualised in these gestures:
Most people go through life dreading theyll go through a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. Theyve already passed their test in life. Theyre aristocrats

Aristocrats on this eternal plenitude, masters of their own speed, of their own molecules and singularities, fully exposed to this
terrible line that shuffles all the diagrams, above the very raging storms ... But however terrible this line may be, it is a line of life that can no longer be gauged by relations between forces, one that carries man beyond terror. For at the place of the fissure the line forms a Law, the 'centre of the cyclone, where one can live and in fact where Life exists par excellence'. It is as if the accelerated speeds, which last only briefly, constituted 'a slow Being' over a longer period of time. It is like a pineal gland, constantly reconstituting itself by changing direction, tracing an inside space but coextensive with the whole line of the outside. The most distant point becomes interior, by being converted into the nearest: life within the folds. This is the central chamber, which one need no longer fear is empty 3 since one fills it with oneself.

Aristocrats on the eternal plenitude of Being.. ,

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, p. 123