Don DeLillo
[Writer, b. 1936, New York, lives in New York.]
All the impulses of the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.
We’re not here to capture an image. We’re here to maintain one.
(On photographers shooting “the most photographed barn in America.”)
In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.
There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.
Traffic lights swayed on cables in a sudden gust. This was the city’s main street, a series of discount stores, check-cashing places, wholesale outlets… How close this was to a classic photography of regret.
A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.
I am not an opponent of the proliferation of pictures in our culture, I am just trying to understand its impact. I like photography, I like to look at photographs and paintings. However, the difference between the world of pictures and the world of printed matter is extraordinary and hard to define. A picture is like the masses: a multitude of impressions. A book on the other hand, with its linear advance of words and characters seems to be connected to individual identity.
