The Man Who Saw Everything

by Deborah Levy

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Jennifer did not understand how the people of a whole country could be locked up behind a wall and not be allowed to leave.

I never could get in or out of that gate;

now that he was dead and couldn’t answer back, I missed his certainty.