Album: a visual essay on photography, loss and the poetics of time as return: In memory of Adriano

This photographic essay was motivated by a reflection on a set of photographs, taken and found from 10 years ago, and the concomitant rediscovery of some of my wife’s youthful writings. By combining creative writing with philosophical debate and photographic imagery, the essay aims at constructing an alternative experience of time, loss and inter-subjectivity. Grounded in a poetical dialogue with theorists and artists such as Barthes, Chris Marker, Blanchot, Levinas, Godard, Derrida, Benjamin, Freud, Susan Sontag and Allan Poe, among others, the work entwines analytical thinking, personal memories, vernacular records and fictional readings. It thus tries to offer a space for imaginal reflexion about the precariousness of memory and the redemptive potentiality of the photographic image, here probed in its simultaneously reciprocal and asynchronous relationship with self-reflexivity and poetico-philosophical writing.