LITMIR.BIZ

      Tour de France, Pley ben, Brittany, July 1939. Photo by Robert Capa. Permission granted by Magnum Photos, Inc.

      The problem of the subject is also, structurally, the problem of language. The subject of experience is the experiencer, but the subject of an essay is its object. The semantic difficulty goes deep, because subject and object are so hard to disentangle, even once one stabilizes one's philosophical terms. Capa's perspective branches into dilemma: in making the watchers his object, he directs our attention not only toward the missing object (the bicyclists toward whom THEIR attention is turned) but toward the missing subject: the viewers of the viewers, the audience we are, who gaze toward and back on our stand-ins, the French crowd. We, with the photographer, establish other presents from which the act of audience can be regarded. Thinking spatially of the spectacle at issue, we are located, vis à vis the crowd, where the race must have been when it was present in front of them. Looked at as seers, we take on the position of the (vanished) seen. At the moments these two photographs were taken, the race was not directly in front of the crowd, but the photographer was. By virtue of his intervention, we (the second audience) establish another before-and aftermath. These perplexities of subject and object, presence and disappearance, call our attention to the question of what it means to be vis à vis the artistic event or object.

      In the unmarked field existing between us and the artist, other paradoxes crop up. In this nest of con-and de-centricities, this riddle of seers and scenes, is the photographer to be imagined as before or behind us? In this case the opposite of before isn't behind, most accurately, but after, since if he were before us in space, we'd see him, and if he were behind us in space, he'd more literally see us; the very thought of the photographer requires us to construct in our minds the probable scene on the near side of the street—another line of lookers, foremost among whom is the man with the camera. But the fiction of photography is the fiction of identity: we enter into a contract of faith through which we are an other; we see things through his eye and stand in his place. Time, rather than space, separates us most from the artist, and the circle this “tour” de France portrays is temporal as much as spatial. (In a sense, it is a portrait of the France that watches the races, invests so much of itself in them, and turns itself to them; it is, in other words, a picture of the “turning of France” to the Tour de France.)

      The artist “in” his work always raises the paradoxical figure of a past that is in front of us. The artist's operation projected us in relation to its object; it foresees our act of seeing. We are the audience which is this diptych's object and yet we are outside it; we bear the relation to audience that we bear to language: we stand as if outside it to describe or define it, even to speak of it at all; and yet we can't escape the fact we're always speaking in it, when we speak. Watching the watchers, we watch what we are. Over the otherwise unbridgeable time-chasm, the photographer is out to get us (he is not only before us, but after us). And how we look is, after all, part of the spectacle's auspices, in the artist's eye: the future foreseen, the past looked after. Seeing is always going on, but by virtue of the still photograph, looking can stay awhile.