Someone else’s diary

I didn’t take these photographs. I don’t recognise anyone on them. Any memory. They are no fruit of my relationship to the world. The ambiguity of the conditions of their recording is not a question that affects me. They have lost their original gestures. If they have ever been attributed any truth, they have now been divested of it. At least did they reach me without it. Whatever such a truth might have been, it is no longer neither a support nor an obstacle to me. And somehow they are mine. They became so by consent, or by abandonment, which is a form of consent. Having been relieved of any intent of speech, these photographs are innocent. Or more accurately, they were so. For now I feel at home within them. Since the time when I selected them among thousands, I have lived many things – with them and inside of them. And I still do. Hence a new ambiguity. A baggage they are now loaded with. I have begun to recognise a face here, a memory there… If these photographs tell more than the loss of their innocence, so far I’m not sure.