Of course, the images selected in this suite of pictures are a particular slice of “the real.” The lyrical, poeticized edge of it, reflecting something that Jean Beaudrillard described as follows: “The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. … Against meaning and its aesthetic, the subversive function of the image is to discover literality in the object (the photographic image, itself an expression of literality, becomes the magical operator of reality’s disappearance).” Not that Baudrillard is entirely sanguine about this process: “In a sense, the photographic image materially translates the absence of reality which ‘is so obvious and so easily accepted because we already have the feeling that nothing is real,’ ” he cautions (quoting Borges). “To be an image, there has to be a moment of becoming which can only happen when the rowdy proceedings of the world are suspended and dismissed for good.” It’s clear to me that we’re still somewhat in mourning for a cut-and-dry world—in so many ways, but speaking here, photographically. Baudrilliard, again: “One may dream of a heroic age of photography when it still was a black box (a camera obscura) and not the transparent and interactive space that it has become.” But this would be a mistake.