“‘Every word — and the whole of language,’ it has been asserted, ‘is onomatopoeic.’” The invention of photography, it was once believed, marked the dawn of a new pictorial age, the beginning of a new kind of language, a “new vision” as Bauhaus instructor László Moholy-Nagy once said. Through the eye of the camera lens, the world re-appears in its communicable form — reality becomes captive to the fluent observer. Like words, images not only reproduce the world but resonate within it. Photography changes things as much as it reveals them. And with its own material subtleties, developed through the history of the practice, photography adds its own significance to that of an object’s appearance. Thus, photographs resemble not only the things they depict but, above all, themselves. Images have their own reality, which is constructed from the patterns of ours. With photography, something new emerges from familiar things, something unexpected, both true and false. Walter Benjamin once described Eugène Atget’s photographs as “scene[s] of action” — “transitory and secret pictures which are able to shock the associative mechanism of the observer to a standstill.” Here, in these photo-collages by Zoe Chronis, the eye of photography reflects on itself, on its compendium of time, expanding and contracting, secreting a feeling of place without context, triggering memories that have never existed. As Benjamin wrote near the end of his life: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the moment of its recognizability and is never seen again.”

—Patrick Zapien