Photography

A biographer working on a book about Ansel Adams came across a
photograph that is now called "Ansel's Finger," named for the fitting
reason that Ansel Adams' finger obstructs part of a Sierra Nevada
nature scene he'd captured. The photograph shows a stream running
between high cliffs with Ansel's finger, covered in black grease,
pointing upwards across the shot at something outside the scope of the
lens. Reduced to two dimensions, the finger appears like an extension
of the stream. For the biographer the photograph represented exactly
the existence of the real man behind the art; a proof, one could say,
in which she believed. On the eve of the book's publication, the
biographer told the story of the discovery of the photograph at a
dinner party and declared that the photograph was a celluloid metonym
of all biography. Among the guests was a relatively famous art critic
and collector who had made a name for himself by declaring that all of
his subjects are "anti-humanist" and, by thorny and tiresome extension,
that all art is anti-human because it is not real. When the biographer
finished her proud announcement, the art critic and collector stood up
and announced that he had purchased the very same photograph at an
auction just the day before. He had purchased it, he said as he turned
to face the dinner guests, because it so fittingly proved his thesis.
He then pointed mockingly at the biographer.