Balzac had a "vague dread" of being photographed. Like some primitive peoples, he thought the camera steals something of the soul -- that, as he told a friend "every body in its natural state is made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films." Each time a photograph was made, he believed, another thin layer of the subject's being would be stripped off to become not life as before but a membrane of memory in a sort of translucent antiworld.
If that is what photography is up to, then the onion of the...
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