Since resuming my photographic practice in 2013 after a twenty-year hiatus, I have given much thought to the question of film as a medium and to the limits of the digital image from the perspective of archival photography, or of any image that seeks to situate itself within the lineage of “witness photographs” (from postcards to photojournalism), whose cinematic counterpart can be found in the documentary work of the Lumière brothers.

Long before the advent of new technologies (digital images captured by cameras or composed by image generators), I had grown accustomed to thinking of photography as a form of imprint, the trace of the spatio-temporal presence of a real thing. Whether that presence was truly effective or not (it is not, strictly speaking, since what is captured is not the object itself but the photons recorded by the device) mattered little to me (and still does), insofar as this play of light presupposed a being in presence. At least as much as with Bazin, I found myself aligned with Barthes’s idea of a founding dimension of photography, summed up in the “that-has-been” (ça-a-été): “The photograph,” he writes in Camera Lucida, “is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body that was there, radiations have issued that come to touch me, who am here.”

Everyone no doubt needs a portable dogma, an axiom that is not up for debate. Mine lay in this fragile link between my presence here and the ghost imprisoned on a sensitive surface, frozen for eternity.

In this respect, images produced by digital devices posed a problem for me. Certainly, the method of capture (a mechanical tool allowing light to be directed toward a surface capable of exploiting it) remained the same, but the nature of the sensor led to a rupture in the link with the captured object: no bodies seized, but bodies decomposed and then recomposed by an algorithm. No ghosts, little presence, even illusory.

As I write this, I am thinking of Serge Daney’s absent father, a possible extra in a highly hypothetical film, whose body—neither alive nor dead—would wander in the limbo of cinema. “I must have spent my life,” he writes, “knowing that he was somewhere, engraved, embedded, embalmed in the black-and-white films of the interwar period, and fearing that one day I would come across him, his celluloid face, his dead eyes that would see me.”

This is why I refuse to take digital photographs. I must myself be too much of a Bazinian to confuse the hyperreal world of Avalon with the flow of workers captured by the Lumière brothers’ camera. My question is not whether the world offered to our gaze is more or less manipulated by digital tools, or even invented from scratch by an ever more powerful AI, but whether something has indeed been captured—not by the camera or the photographic device, but by the film, the photosensitive emulsion that preserves, if not the effective presence of a tangible reality, at least the photonic imprint of what has been.