the
mute
testimony
Image

“To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer’s craft.”
(John Szarkowski)

The Mute Testimony is a growing archive of quotations that attempt to describe the medium of photography, the camera, and the function of individual photographs. Drawn from a range of literary, theoretical, and art-historical sources, the archive is then recontextualized through different modes of presentation and in combination with various image repositories. For this iteration, the site uses the Art Institute of Chicago’s public API to randomly pair text excerpts with works from the museum’s collection that are classified under “photograph,” generating a virtually endless number of ways in which to interpret both the content of specific pictures and the shifting perceptions of the medium itself.

Archiving: Alan Huck
Web Design: Jonas Feige

  • 1
    an elusive opening
  • 2
    the space of a single minute
  • 3
    the negation of chronology
  • 4
    a force of interruption
  • 5
    the site of a gap, a sublime breach between the sensible and the intelligible, between copy and reality, between a memory and a hope
  • 6
    a plagiarism of nature
  • 7
    instantaneous and occult
  • 8
    akin to medieval thinking
  • 9
    a prophecy of the glorious body
  • 10
    some marvel of a fairy tale or delusion of necromancy
  • 11
    an impressionable material that welcomes spirits
  • 12
    a secret about a secret
  • 13
    like images in the memory of a total stranger
  • 14
    a message without a code
  • 15
    a free and familiar coinage of meaning
  • 16
    a language that names what it describes
  • 17
    a language that is guided and interrupted by the desire for the very thing that, always lost, and never comprehended, remains to be mourned
  • 18
    a consoling object
  • 19
    an act of love
  • 20
    a rubbing or rubbing away of the body
  • 21
    a sort of personal anthropology
  • 22
    a memento from a life being lived
  • 23
    like flies in amber
  • 24
    like a footprint or a death mask
  • 25
    a logical extension of the pressed flower
  • 26
    a graft off of natural space
  • 27
    a true ghost
  • 28
    a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object
  • 29
    an incomparable revelation
  • 30
    an hallucination that is also a fact
  • 31
    a bit of natural magic that an inquisitive and restless society had stumbled upon
  • 32
    a medium born whole
  • 33
    the golden key opening the doors to the wonders of the external universe
  • 34
    a strange invention—with unforeseeable consequences
  • 35
    that great distorter of things as they are
  • 36
    a species of alchemy
  • 37
    a passive accomplice to our own story-telling
  • 38
    a device for accumulating energy
  • 39
    the conduit for the umbilical cord of light
  • 40
    a solar phenomenon in which the artist collaborates with the sun
  • 41
    an infallibly retentive super-retina
  • 42
    the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world
  • 43
    the recorder of bald, prosaic fact
  • 44
    the great, the incredible instrument of symbolic actuality
  • 45
    the central instrument of our time
  • 46
    our measure of the world
  • 47
    reality gnawed at by the real
  • 48
    the tomb of the real
  • 49
    a kind of deposit of the real itself
  • 50
    the absolute Particular, the sovereign contingency
  • 51
    the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event
  • 52
    simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye
  • 53
    an everyday strategy of affirmation
  • 54
    a concrete kind of fiction
  • 55
    a true interpretation
  • 56
    a certificate of presence
  • 57
    a scientific performance
  • 58
    a devilish device designed to capture life but unable to convey it
  • 59
    a building block in a larger structure
  • 60
    a universe of dots
  • 61
    a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny
  • 62
    the site where the collaboration coughs up its secret
  • 63
    bitter, pungent, sweet, sour, and salty droplets mechanically extracted from a more fluid existence
  • 64
    a disposition of sensible matter
  • 65
    like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb
  • 66
    less an answer than a reflection of the questions
  • 67
    an immobile and silent surface
  • 68
    the mirror with a memory
  • 69
    the prophecy of a human memory yet to be socially and politically achieved
  • 70
    an element of a new and homogenous terrain of consumption and circulation in which the observer becomes lodged
  • 71
    a perishable commodity
  • 72
    a disreputable thing, like theft
  • 73
    one means for the deterritorialization of national boundaries
  • 74
    a peculiarly intent form of secrecy
  • 75
    a rumor, a kind of pornography of art
  • 76
    the most irresistible form of mental pollution
  • 77
    a diabolical manifestation of the modern
  • 78
    a positive and irrevocable chaotizing of the Cosmos
  • 79
    a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions
  • 80
    a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity
  • 81
    an equivalent of the emergency, the crisis, single and simplified
  • 82
    the greatest disaster of the twentieth century
  • 83
    a shock from which we have not yet recovered
  • 84
    the name of the destruction of any consciousness of identity
  • 85
    vastly pregnant with the imminence of a revelation that never quite transpires
  • 86
    the product of complete alienation
  • 87
    a form of lunacy
  • 88
    a concession made to the World
  • 89
    a future perfect being endlessly ripped apart
  • 90
    a jumble that consists partly of garbage
  • 91
    a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations
  • 92
    a society in miniature
  • 93
    fragile and slippery carriers of meaning
  • 94
    loose leaves which can be passed from hand to hand
  • 95
    signs, half-truths, cripples, fictions that live only by moments and know only the surface of things
  • 96
    inadequate and overwhelming thing, impossible testimony
  • 97
    a silent rectangle of paper
  • 98
    just a picture
  • 99
    an utterance of some sort