The event now reaches us only through a screen, in a room, thousands of kilometres from the place where it occurs. So I have moved the reporter's post. I do not photograph the event — I photograph the window through which it reaches us. The reportage of a reportage.

For this window is not one we chose to be neutral. What it pours out is slanted: drama fills almost all the space, the world's misfortune flows in without pause, reaching even the person whose own life nothing threatens. By dint of seeing everything, we believe ourselves to be in danger everywhere — and we hold onto an image of the world darker than the world itself. This work is also an acknowledgement of that imbalance: to dissolve the image is to refuse to endure it as it is served to us. But refusal is not enough. If I gather the world's many states, it is to give back to beauty, to joy, to all that rises, the place the window denies them. Not to lie about the real — there is pain, and it has the right to be seen — but to restore a proportion. To show that a concert, a laughing face, a gesture of solidarity are events too, and that they deserve for us to stop before them for as long as it takes. Against the over-exposure of the worst, to set the attention owed to what deserves to be kept.

This displacement is not a renunciation, it is a fidelity. It tells the truth of our condition: between the world and us a layer of images has slipped in, and it is with this layer, not with the world, that we spend our evenings. To photograph the screen rather than the street is to photograph the only real we truly touch.

There remains, then, one question, which is the whole subject: what is left of the world when we look at it through something else? These images answer in their own way. The event, in passing through the window, loses its outlines. It becomes glimmer, trace, apparition. What was taken to be the most faithful transmission reveals itself to be the most spectral. And we can no longer always tell apart what took place from what was merely fabricated for the screen — a ghost made to dance is then worth as much as a crowd that marches. It is precisely that blur, between the real and its spectre, that we inhabit without seeing it.

This work is only beginning. It will take the world as the screen gives it to us, in all its states: the grave and the trivial, the pain of the news, the beauty that slips into it, and the imaginings we fabricate in order to bear it.

For the window shows not only facts — it also shows our dreams, our fictions, our resurrected dead. To gather these states into a single series is to draw the portrait not of the world, but of the image we keep of it. The only one, in the end, with which we live.

Any reproduction, distribution or use of these images without the express written permission of the artist is strictly prohibited. © Charles Hamonnais — All rights reserved.