Recently finished merging process of photos taken in front of Hofburg palace, former imperial palace in the centre of Vienna, Austria
Hofburg Palace
The Dead Man
After reading Maurice Blanchot’s ‘The Two Versions of Imaginary’, this photography taken by one of my friends, Akın Çetin, came to my mind. Even though he was unaware about Blanchot’s text, I personally think that he pretty much expresses the overall idea of ‘The Two Versions of Imaginary’. Blanchot states that image is a sort of cadaver. Image creates a paradoxical and enigmatic situation. It’s there and not there, blurs the distinction between time and space just as a cadaver does. Cadaver, Blanchot says, resembles himself – because the physical body might be here and but it’s also in another place, at the dimension where death leads.
A cadaver does no longer resembles to the person that once has lived, it’s someone else now – Death has changed him. Akın has consciously preferred not to show the face of cadaver, but at the same time he has put the photo of cadaver, placed a photo inside a photo. Thus, by depicting the relationship between image and cadaver, Akın makes the viewer apart of this situation to take into account. It exposes the coalescence of virtual and real, life and death, resemblance and real, self and other, presence and absence…
You can also find further details about his book ‘Immense et Rouge’ from here.