Franz Kafka
[Writer, b. 1883, Prague, d. 1924, Prague.]
Your sight does not master the pictures, it is the pictures that master your sight.
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds.
Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.
Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling.
A picture of my existence... would show a useless wooden stake covered in snow... stuck loosely at a slant in the ground in a ploughed field on the edge of a vast open plain on a dark winter night.
When I look at your little photo, I am always astonished by the force which ties us together. Behind all there is to contemplate, behind the cherished face... act forces which are so near and dear and so indispensable to me, all of it is a real mystery in which the tiny creatures that we are must collapse in total submission.
