The Instant and Its Shadow: A Story of Photography

The Instant and Its Shadow is a brilliant theoretical and lyrical meditation on the spectral nature and radiating power of photography that will take its place with other contemporary French classics. The book is packed with profound illuminations and stellar insights about the medium on its every page.-Louis Kaplan, University of TorontoA compelling and innovative reflection on the way photography captures and condenses timeTwo photographs, connected by a ladder, separated by a century. First, William Henry Fox Talbot photographed a faithfully realistic image of a ladder against a haystack in the English countryside. One hundred years later, an anonymous photographer captured another ladder, photographed alongside an incinerated man by the blinding light of the atomic bomb. These two images underpin Bailly's poetic and theoretical reflection on the origins of photographic technique, the imaginative power of montage, and the relation of photography to time itself.Bailly's book is at once a lyrical homage to some of the founding texts of photographic theory and a startling reminder of photography's uncanny power. Jean-Christophe Bailly teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage, in Blois, France, and the author of The Animal Side. Samuel E. Martin is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His translation of Georges Didi-Huberman's Bark, won the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.