| Summary: | <p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: medium;">Photography incarnates a dream of transparency since, as Roland Barthes says, “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see. In short, the referent adheres”. In this regard, he provides a strange example: “The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape”. In t</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: medium;">his sense, photography perfectly realises the illusion of a support which is unveiled in its materiality in order to become a pure objectivity. </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;">According to Proust, this supposed transparency is destined to fail: no photograph, in the </span><em><span style="font-size: medium;">Recherche</span></em><span style="font-size: medium;">, ever leads us to a moment of recognition. It's as if photographs were not able to let the original rise up – in transparency – without operating some kind of alteration or modification. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">Proust’s scepticism toward photography is bound to a particular conception of time: he criticises in particular the </span><em><span style="font-size: medium;">instantané</span></em><span style="font-size: medium;">, a kind of image that pretends to extract a sole instant from the continual flux of time. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The </span><em><span style="font-size: medium;">instantané,</span></em><span style="font-size: medium;"> however, is not the only aspect of photography considered by Proust. Proust uses expressions like “cliché négatif”, “chambre noire intérieure”, “entrée condamnée”, to show us less the description of a “photo-graphy” (light-writing) than that of a “skia-graphy” (shadows-writing). Finally, I consider the </span><em><span style="font-size: medium;">topos </span></em><span style="font-size: medium;">of the “not developed” photograph with relation to the Proustian conception of memory, that is, a memory which, according to Walter Benjamin, is deeply connected with oblivion and with the shadows of our experience. </span></span></p>
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