After all, why pretend that a photo is something other than what it is – a small, flat cardboard cut-out in a rectangular frame? Why bring in the third dimension, a new dimension with an interlacing of the lines and directions that give us enough problems as it is in normal life? Yes, there are people who are brave enough to try it. I myself venture into some risky experimentation from time to time. I usually regret doing so later. That’s why I prefer to seek out these places where the world is flat. Even better, I seek out a world built from shapes that are easily reconciled between parallel lines. It’s sad because that way I don’t meet anyone. It’s strange because I then run into stories that couldn’t be more human, stories about how we try to build our own order around ourselves. And about how we then destroy that order, covering it with new layers of images and letters that we haven’t devoted much thought to. Or that we even forget about and allow to slowly disintegrate into rags, like wallpaper coming unpeeled from the walls.
November 28, 2001 

Even if the world contains an enigma, and even if our place in this world is to understand that enigma, travelling is not the best way to do so. For, if such an enigma exists, it should be accessible or inaccessible to the same degree from any place on earth. I have come to this conclusion on several occasions, but I don’t think it’s a valid conclusion, even if I am unable to find the flaw in the reasoning that leads to such a conclusion. There is more than one way to express the problem. If I make a photo to express a truth about the world, it shouldn’t matter which direction I point the lens. In any case, I will always take a picture of this world – this same world with its truth. And yet, it is always different.
This is what I was thinking of recently, as I was sitting at a Paris sidewalk cafe. I was holding the camera on my knees. Two meters from my table a wide avenue opened up, separating me from a square that was enclosed on one side by the Montparnasse Tower – in glass – and, on the other, by the Montparnasse train station. That year, the second half of October was unusually warm and sunny. I was looking in front of me. I saw painted lines on the avenue, billboards, lampposts, cars driving by, and people gathered in uniform fashion on the edge of the sidewalk in order to cross when the light turned and then to disperse on the other side of the street. The very high, dark façade of the skyscraper shone in the sunlight. If I were to take a picture of it, it would depict the same world that I was looking at a few weeks ago when I was looking at some shots of an airliner that was vanishing into a similar surface. But would it, in fact, be the same world?
It put the lens to my eye and looked through the viewfinder. Not towards the tower, but towards the sidewalk. A fragment of the leg of the chair next to me entered into the frame, along with an empty sugar wrapper that the wind had blown under my table, a cigarette butt, the feet of a woman who was waiting at a pedestrian crosswalk. I raised the lens. I now saw the surface of the avenue. The geometric composition was plain but interesting nonetheless. Two lines – a yellow broken one between the two lanes, and the light grey band of the sidewalk – defined the frame’s rectangle. There was one more detail that disrupted this order. A fragment of a signpost? A shadow? A metal sewer grating? I don’t remember. If I had pressed the shutter, it would have been easy to remember.
An unclear situation on the continent, Swiat Literacki, 2003
August 15, 2004
 
I had been at the Elk, Poland train station for half an hour, and I slowly began to get used to the idea that nothing interesting was going to happen to me here. I had almost 20 minutes left until a train arrived with Janusz, whom I had come to meet. I had time to walk around the main hall of the train station twice. I looked at a homeless woman, dirty, dozing on the bench, whose life should represent a series of misfortunes all the more horrible as they were ordinary. Right next to the ticket windows, I looked over the Internet cafe price list. I read almost everything that could be read, including the colour posters of nearby lakes and other tourist attractions. I also closely inspected the grey-yellow texture of the stone that covered the walls of the main hall. I didn’t take any notice of these things, as I should have.
Feeling that I was about to waste a moment of forced idleness that destiny had offered me, I walked out to the square in front of the station. The square did not have a clear shape that would tell me which direction I should take for a stroll. So I took about 10 tentative steps and then stopped. It was evening. On my left there was a row of snack bars and on the right a grove of trees and bushes that had been neglected too much to serve, as apparently intended, as the symbolic centre of this shapeless public square. And, in front of me, a three-storey apartment building with shop windows on the ground floor. The main street of the town came to a dead end at the building.
I looked behind me. The round clock hanging above the entrance to the main hall of the station urged me to reflect on the perilous enigma of time, but instead only brought forth an indulgent smile, and I quickly calculated the small steps that the minute hand would have to take until the train arrived. Twelve. And, then, a moment later, eleven. Regardless of the time, there is less and less of it. So I lowered my eyes. I saw a small window between the two entrances to the main hall of the station, a window that framed the head and shoulders of a young woman like a passport photo. And she was just as still as in a passport photo. She was staring at somewhere above the taxi stand, as if, at any moment, a neon sign would light up, telling her what would lie in her future. The blurry LEFT LUGGAGE sign that I noticed near the window – a window too small for a midsized suitcase – instead of explaining the image, just made it even more incomprehensible. I glanced at the taxi stand but nothing was happening there. When I turned back around, the young woman had vanished from the small window.
Not knowing what to think, I shrugged my shoulders and looked under my feet. And it was not until then that I noticed that my tentative steps had taken me to a sewer drain enclosed with a concrete plate. But not really concrete, to tell the truth, because the concrete covered just a round, massive cast-iron structure that a cross split into quarters. The concrete of one of the quarters had crumbled and had probably fallen inside, revealing a passage into complete darkness. I once again had the feeling that someone or something was trying to draw me into a useless and dangerous inquiry on the reciprocal relationship between the visible and the invisible. Even so, I’ve always had a soft spot for philosophers who suspect that the truth is hidden deeply under the layer of appearances. Once again, I declined to allow myself to be drawn into the trap, for what else could this be but a trap, this hole that suddenly opened up on the smooth surface of the pavement?
So, instead of looking into the depths, I once again looked around me. Still nothing. A row of snack bars, a partition, the block of flats, the grocery store, the dead end street. So I looked again, but more closely. The first snack bar had a drinks fridge pushed up against the partition. The partition or, rather, a sort of iron netting and, above that, a few billboards. The apartment building, the apartment windows, the grocery store on the ground floor and the shop’s sign. That was a little better. Something was beginning to repeat itself.
On drinks fridge, on one of the signs hanging on the partition, on the store sign, the same word was repeated: “Coca-Cola”. On the shop sign it was written twice. I came back to my point de departure, i.e., the fridge and then slowly turned completely around and counted all the times that the word “Coca-Cola” entered my field of vision.
Thirteen. Whatever that means, I was overjoyed that I had at last learned something about the world. In and of itself, this knowledge had no great value. It may not even be knowledge but rather just a semblance of knowledge, but its exact and mathematical appearance placed it on a higher plane than all the other observations that might be made on the round concrete sewer cover, in front of the Elk, Poland train station.
The time of forced idleness was drawing to an end. The noise of the train arriving in the station made me realise that even though I still had my back turned to the white dial of the clock, its minute hand had – without my being aware of it or having anything to do with it – taken eleven new steps.
Karbard horse business plan, Swiat Literacki, Warsaw, 2006
August 8, 2005

Now I have to look at things more attentively than I used to. It was not until noon, sitting on the short wall in front of the church in Piatigorsk, Poland, that I realised that my camera was showing exposure times and shutter speeds that were quite unlikely, but I suspect that they were already like that. And what if it was impossible to discern any image from the rectangles of film exposed to the light of recent days?
Yes, I am well aware that the brain memorises the world based on a completely different principle than that of film. But if I don’t want to come back from this trip empty-handed, I am apparently left with no other choice. Even if, on the other hand, I have to admit that there are more and more things in the world that were better off not set into any particular medium.
From this point of view, the camera is a tool that is much less dangerous than the human brain, since the world finds its way inside only when I feel the right moment has come to open the shutter. Imagine that we had the same power to decide whether to open our minds to what is out there. For I can always close my eyes.
But this isn’t true. For how many miles can we cover with our eyes closed, opening them just a few times a day for one hundredth of a second or, depending on whether the sky is clear or cloudy, for a sixtieth of a second? Even if you travel on roads in Russia, which sometimes go straight on for dozens of miles, you could not cover a single one of them with your eyes closed.
So I just look.
Karbard horse business plan, Swiat Literacki, Warsaw, 2006

Translation by Wioletta Miskiewicz
(reread by François Chirpaz)