About pictures : ''Moi, les photos, je les vois pas.''

To abstract painters who showed him photos of their wives and children, Alberto Giacometti replied that he didn't see their pictures, that he didn't see any photo : ''Moi, les photos, je les vois pas''. (Interview with Georges Charbonnier, April 16, 1957, cf You tube : Alberto Giacometti -Entretiens (1953 et 1957) : 10.44 (in French) ; published in Le Monologue du peintre, Paris, Julliard, 1959). He didn't understand what they wanted to show him. He didn't think photos are acceptable representations of reality. 

A photographic reflection of a natural object is still, static, inert, lacks all physical activity. The real object is ever active, ever changing, even stones or oak logs. Its real being is more in this activity, in this perpetual newness, than in the fixed reflection captured by the camera.

I gave up drawing and photo precisely because they cannot catch the most interesting element of landscape, of nature : its incessant physical newness. The only physical newness of a picture (painting, photo -paper or digital) is that of its material medium.

So when I look at a photo, I have in mind that what I see is not fixed and inert, -that the reflection is fixed and inert, but that the reality is always actively, intensely new and fresh -and this thought is exhilarating, because it reminds me of the exhilarating fact of the continuous freshness of nature. Younger, I remember watching a movie : there were outside scenes : the landscape -sand, stone, south, sun- seemed to me so intense that characters and story became uninteresting and worthless : the important thing was not fiction and characters, it was the wonderful reality of the landscape in the sun. It was no more a movie, it was images of a natural phenomenon : sun on the bark and leaves of the trees, on the stones, on the ground, -images of their perpetual newness. The filmmaker had caught a reflection of the perpetual event of the physical newness of nature, but it was only for him an outside background, a secondary fact, -the primary fact was for him the fiction, not the amazing material reality of this world. What I saw was not reality -the reality you experience on the spot-, it was only its inert reflection, but it was sufficient to make the fiction uninteresting and pointless. By the burning bush (or, in a theater, by the reflection of the burning bush), fiction is a poor thing.