That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images... But when, in the mid-nineteenth century, the standard finally seemed attainable, the retreat of old religious and political illusions before the advance of humanistic and scientific thinking did not - as anticipated - create mass defections to the real. On the contrary, the new age of unbelief strengthened the allegiance to images.
Photography is acquisition...
