Photography's readiness to lend itself to just about any purpose constitutes its strength as well as its fascination. Its rhetoric, however, is congenial with the hardly defineable voice of written language; what is the photographed object as an image? The text rests upon this coincidence, not in terms of a deliberate mystification, but as a miracle.

Photographs of building-sites cannot rest safely on their documentary value. The building-site represents a future that contains a not yet existing reality, and thus it has a visionary significance. In this way, photography turns around its given temporal axis, from a "to-have-been" to an "already-being-something-else". This is a way to undermine the ontological presuppositions of photography. Ordinary photography serves the purpose of preserving the memory of the event. This freezing down, this almost agressive act ("to shoot a photo") could be said to constitute a sublime testimony to the incapacity of memory. In this case, the memory-image is transformed into a Christian ideal, a bodily and historical zero point, where every statement and every poetic description, seeks to transfigure an insurmountable materiality. (I friend of mine comes to my mind, who always takes the opportunity to take photos of flowers, but never cares to look at them afterwards). A wedge of unreality in the obviously and overwhelmingly real signifies that what can be transcended in photography is not the dichotomy between phantasm and fact, but possibly, if we understand this as an imperative within a Lutheran culture, the notion of chaos as a dark side. And this even more so, as an analogous anarchy spreads by way of a refined digital breeding, and as photography's chemical connection to light is obliterated. For where memory, subjective time and presence, stand in an intimate relation to each other, photography constitutes a break, a blind spot, both literally and figuratively; it is precisely when the shutter is down and the photo is taken that the photographer does not see. In the moral sense, photography should therefore be understood as an abandoned and sacrificed reality, as an act without hope.

One of the conceptions most closely connected to photographic representation is that of the mirror - a perceptual missile launched in two steps: the camera "grasps" reality, and the viewer sees the representational result as that very same reality. The viewer is put into doubt as to whether it makes any sense to see something that could equally well be seen somewhere else in reality. This doubt is very serious, when not enough time has elapsed between the moment the photo was taken and the moment it becomes seen in order for it to become transformed into a "meaningful" document, or if the photo hasn't been put to use and been completely named by institutions and mass media. In order for something to become visible at all in a virginal and deviant sense, this implosive side of photography has to be transformed into an expansion on the level of signification. From coincidence to theft.

This criminal intention is a triple one: photography not only steals appearances and reduces the world to the colour of surface, but it also tends towards draining the viewer's projections of their substance, by way of insisting on its own passive way of showing - photography is in fact what it seems to be. This might be the origin of the idea of the "truth" of photography, as independent of projections - and photography is itself begotten by projection. Unlike the surface, the extreme illusion of the image moves in a positive way, towards the viewer and the abstract body, towards a transparent political and social reality, naturalia permeated by ideology. And furthermore: photographs are images of reality only to the extent that reality is created in the act of viewing, where illusion turns back and consciousness returns to Time. And it is even more difficult for   photography to defend itself as Realism, since the latter is tied to the power over the definition of what is real. As iconographic hardware, however, photography forms a part of our representation of the world, and it is constitutive for experience in the same fundamental way as is a tree, a car, or language itself. The third form of theft is associated with the second. It rests upon the falsity of the mirror conception, a falsity due to the fact that mirror images are more or less mobile and refer to the representational form of cinema, because mirrors reflect life. A freezing down of vision analogous to photography could possibly be achieved through meditative stillness, but yet photography remains a completely unique experience in its indiscriminate all-over focus, where all details are there and everything is inscribed. This could be an a priori for how the world (possibly) appears before the subject has arrived. Yet, with the aid of photography, one is present as a viewer, as a peeping Tom witnessing something that normally should be impossible to see. This surrealism is a basic element in Modernism, its raw material and transcendent hope, a paradoxical promise of another world through the world itself.

The third theft thus acquires its significance: in its lack of identity and its overabundance of identificatory possibilities, photography claims experiences in order to create meaning, but without being able to perform this task. My intention is to extract to the opposite, but through photography's own means. A reversed minimalism applied to photography in order to make it show itself. By holding their message within themselves, and supporting their own rhethoric, these seven images speak the truth, since they only talk about themselves, and neglect the user.

Metaphor. Absence of house. You look into the image of the absent I, and from a purely logical point of view, what you see has to be the opposite of the I, since no body is present. But this opposite is not emptiness, because emptiness is a feeling, the cement of human relations, but not of the visible. It is up to each and everyone how to make these images into objects. When the interpretative work is finished, we see that this dream is a wish come true. To include it is a defensible attitude towards letting yourself be robbed.

Bengt Olof Johansson

translation from Swedish by Sven-Olov Wallenstein