fringes of their history, flesh hampered by the sale memory of pleasure . Not bodies, only signals of those bodies and their shreds. The photographs of Merry Alpern refuse the wiles of memory. None of them displays either a recognizable body or a familiar face. She blurs every trait, eludes the fixedness of the gazes and the neatness of the profiles. The fate of those bodies is to summon gazes without memory that, nevertheless , lend themselves to the imagination of tales and staries, to the fiction of past events and encounterso The obsession deprives the photographic action of the photographer's identity, of her gaze, indifferent as the bodies in the images are. The bodies in the picture unfold as a series of equivocal shadows of a gaze without a history. The photographer's face and identity dissolve befare the fleeting presence of pieces of bodies with neither a past nor a memory. Alpem 's photographic series bear testimony to the path of a gaze driven by a ghostly passion which falls upon the shadow of two bodies fettered by the ritual of transience. The fusion of two universes: that which emerges from the contact between the genitals and that of the photographic capture. The photographic image is the residue of two compulsive series: the photographic gaze and sexuality. The recalcitran t , fascinated, repeated gaze lost in the slope of perversion couples itself to the insistent history of the changing,
indifferent bodies that penetrate each other, while they dip into the indifferent closure of the ritual. The photographs evince the residual signs, almost secret, of this prostitution contracto We see the obsessive images of the purses on the women's nude bodies as the relic and trace of the contract; on the lightened surface of the window, the stark manipulation of the genitals, the bilis, the bec louded grimace of penetration. The physiognomies turn into shapeless spots, of barely foreseeable bodies, engaged
in an oral relation. Bodies caught in the solitude of a momentary abandonment, or in the instant they turn to gaze upon each other, in that suffocating, anonymous sphere of the bodies . One must stare at those bodies which seek to conceal themselves from the gaze, and which have been socially excluded from tolerable viewing, one must look at them while they imagine a silence for themselves, look at them while they seek to build their own invisibility, look at them nourish, disdain, enjoy the oblivion of the others.