“In 1850, Delacroix recorded in his Journal the success of some “experiments in photography” carried
out in Cambridge, where astronomers were photographing the sun and the moon and had managed to obtain an impression of the star Vega the size of a pinhead.The artist added the following “curious” observation: Since the light of the star whose daguerreotype was obtained took twenty years to traverse the space that separates it from Earth, the ray that was óxed on the plate therefore had left the celestial sphere long before Daguerre discovered the process by which we have just gained control of this light.” ——Susan Sontag, On Photography, p. 220.
The light, like the ‘head of a pin’ in the midst of the cosmos, according to Delacroix, took twenty years to arrive. An image of a star, or the ruins of its body, presents an event that has long since taken place. On the contrary, inside the mother’s body, there is a gestation, a throbbing that is still virtually unknown. It is this type of conjunction of opposing forces and times that this book is made of. Consisting of enigmatic images that enunciate matters from the past in order to announce possibilities for other lives.
João Sarmento SJ
