A Poetic excerpt for Iris and Dorie and other girls who like photography

It was a lesson in vision and in a way of seeing, but, more fundamentally, lesson in blindness and in seeing with and through blindness. To even begin to close with the significant moment, the photographer must learn to become invisible. Poeple are blind to his or her presence. The closing and the moving into position are in response to far more than visual perception, since the crucial energies happen beyond vision, in the realm of feelings and instincts. What the photographer 'sees', most people do not see, precisely because they are seeing only with the eyes. In the moment of capture, of course, the photographer is literally blind. The release of button is pressed by a finger wired to a complex of energies, the shutter closes, and for an instant the critical moment, the critical five-hundedth of a second perhaps - the photographer is in darkness. He or she only 'sees' the image when it emerges later in the darkroom. The moment and its image have been anticipated, and the image is not the product of sight, but of prescience, prevision, that vision that 'sees' into the futre. It is a seeing in blindness, the soul's gaze. The photographer is figured, or prefigured, by Tiresias, the blind seer. And he photograph is the archive of the invisible.

From A Shaft of Darkness: Derrida in the Archive Fever - Verne Harris