Shadows of Doubt
In this series of images, ‘objects of fear and betrayal’ (Prawer 1989) were scanned on a flat bed scanner against a black velvet background.
‘In his Histoire(s) du Cinema (1998), Godard remarks that we never remember plots of Hitchcock films […] What remember are merely images. More precisely, we remember shots focussing on some key objects: a handbag, a glass of milk, wings of a mill, a curl of hair, a row of bottles, a pair of glasses, a score of music, a cigarette lighter and so forth.’
‘Hitchcock’s cinema is permeated by fetish objects, many of which have highly architectural or domestic connotations such as a bunch of keys, a doorknob, a closed door, a darkened window of the top of a staircase….Hitchcock’s (neo-) Victorian houses illustrate Benjamin’s interpretation of the bourgeois interior perfectly. All objects seem to have put aside their commodity and use value. As fetishes, they seem to put a spell on the characters.’
Steven Jacobs
‘…we do not mean to imply that these terms [knowledge and belief] have a negative relation to each other, that belief is the negative of knowledge, for example. Nor that belief is a flawed cognitive relation to the world and knowledge is a correct one. If we proceed from the understanding that belief is the fundamental attitude that a person has when he or she holds that a proposition is true, and that knowledge is certified true belief (by virtue of evidence), then clearly we need to ask about how any proposition becomes true or false and what constitutes evidence. In this regard, and as has been argued, it is clear that what we hold to be true is not necessarily consistent with what is true at the level of the senses, reason, consciousness and discourse but also with what holds to be true at the level of the unconscious. Hence, we would urge you to approach these documents we present as we do, as “hysterical symptoms” based not on any one person’s actual memories but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories.’
The Atlas Group, Review of Photographic Memory, ed. Jalal Toufic (Beirut: Arab Image Foundation, 2004), 44-45.
In this series of images, ‘objects of fear and betrayal’ (Prawer 1989) were scanned on a flat bed scanner against a black velvet background.
‘In his Histoire(s) du Cinema (1998), Godard remarks that we never remember plots of Hitchcock films […] What remember are merely images. More precisely, we remember shots focussing on some key objects: a handbag, a glass of milk, wings of a mill, a curl of hair, a row of bottles, a pair of glasses, a score of music, a cigarette lighter and so forth.’
‘Hitchcock’s cinema is permeated by fetish objects, many of which have highly architectural or domestic connotations such as a bunch of keys, a doorknob, a closed door, a darkened window of the top of a staircase….Hitchcock’s (neo-) Victorian houses illustrate Benjamin’s interpretation of the bourgeois interior perfectly. All objects seem to have put aside their commodity and use value. As fetishes, they seem to put a spell on the characters.’
Steven Jacobs
‘…we do not mean to imply that these terms [knowledge and belief] have a negative relation to each other, that belief is the negative of knowledge, for example. Nor that belief is a flawed cognitive relation to the world and knowledge is a correct one. If we proceed from the understanding that belief is the fundamental attitude that a person has when he or she holds that a proposition is true, and that knowledge is certified true belief (by virtue of evidence), then clearly we need to ask about how any proposition becomes true or false and what constitutes evidence. In this regard, and as has been argued, it is clear that what we hold to be true is not necessarily consistent with what is true at the level of the senses, reason, consciousness and discourse but also with what holds to be true at the level of the unconscious. Hence, we would urge you to approach these documents we present as we do, as “hysterical symptoms” based not on any one person’s actual memories but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories.’
The Atlas Group, Review of Photographic Memory, ed. Jalal Toufic (Beirut: Arab Image Foundation, 2004), 44-45.