Objects in photographs always present themselves with a certain thereness, even for the photographer herself. How is it that they feel so elusive, like a liquid fish flowing away every time I focus my gaze? If an existence, where?
Surely not here and now, for the only object whose existence I can affirm is the photograph itself. Here is not where they are. Perhaps there then? But, there — where that person stood next to such and such, against that red brick wall with a clock striking four — is not where I am. Alibi witnesses testifying for one another, a farce. Convince, or be convicted!
Still, we are led to lead a perpetual struggle for a make-believe, to believe in a second-order otherness atop the first, to ourselves walk a tightrope shouldering their existence here and now. We are crows circling around a static scarecrow, taking straws for a carcass.
Such is precisely the unresolvable mystery Blow-Up articulates. As Thomas sought depth in surfaces of surfaces to make sense of the passed, trying to prove the existed on the existing, the passing mimes seemed like zealous cultists. With copies — and copies of copies — stolen, the existing collapsed into an existed in the mind. Where did it all begin — this recursive circulation of imagination? Left only with the final image, an abstraction of a reality mutilated beyond recognition, what was Thomas to do?
He picked up the tennis ball and joined the mimes.
