Nightwalkers

Abstract

From 1933 we have Brassaï's portrait of the poet Léon-Paul Fargue, a thickset man in fedora and overcoat seated on a park bench, illumined by the gaslight thrown by a lamp we infer but do not see (Fig. 1). This, we think, is what Fargue looked like, or, we might add, really looked like, schooled as we are in the objectivity of the camera's testimony. In the very framing of the image we find reassurance on this matter of veracity. For unlike the compositional tightness and rigor of painted portraits, there is something happenstance about this image, as though in the effort to capture the sitter sur le vif too much of the setting has been included, too wide a visual net has been cast. Fargue sits eccentrically within the frame, and to his left (our right) a seemingly careless expanse of park opens backward into the city's night. The inclusiveness of the setting acts to secure the image's apartness from painting, acts, that is, as a kind of witness to the process of the image's making: internal testimony to the fact that this is indeed a photograph and thus all the testimony we need to the belief that the image is of reality.

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