to imitate the rhythms 01 Saturdays and Sundays when lamilies are out walking, children eating ice cream eones, babies in strollers and couples walking hand in hand in their instantaneous paradise. It is the splendor 01 Saturdays and Sundays when tensions ease and kindness can cover extreme actions. Here the territory 01 parks , plazas and their patriotic monuments , the avenues and parades is the right one. And the best season is Summer. The Pursuer carries his camera on a cord around his neck. He walks, smiles, buys a bag 01 candy and carelessly eats from it. He sits on a bench and gazes patiently and serenely at the horizon. At midday -the perlect hour- the Pursuer begins his work, which he will abandon three or lour hours later once the parade ends, families scatter, couples drift , the sun dims, and hunger and thirst win out . Another day done with three or four rolls of film to be developed at the local photography shop where a lab technician might even notice some weird shots. However , a technician at a neighborhood lab is accustomed to the extravagances of famil y snapshots and, therefore, will not give a second thought to the Pursuer's photographs. In the solitude of his apartment, the Pursuer will take a beer out 01 the refrigerator and he will sit on hi s sofa with the metallic boxes that he treasures on his lap. He will open the lock and see the ordered photographs that he has taken. He takes out his favorites, holds them up to the light (or projects
them against a wall) and compares them in his mind to those he has taken during the day. He smiles, satisfied. The Pursuer enjoys the secret vengeance 01 his microscopic demons. The Pursuer has the luck of a classic flaneur, but with a camera around his neck. For him, the streets are also his home. The same well-being envelops him that envelops a bourgeois under the rool 01 his mansion. The light posts, installations, advertisements represent ornaments as valuable to him as are the paintings on the walls 01 a bourgeois' home: "the walls are the desk where he places his notebook" or, one could add, the walls are the observatory onto which he shoots his photographs. To make something visible that is invisible has originated in those who are addicted to perversions and to what is base. It involves a cultural narrative that is linked to modernity and the genesis 01 a liberated body, andwhere photographic art shelters decisive testimonies Irom different societies and locations. In its urban nomadism, the man with the indiscreet camera is obsessed with one specialty: to hunt naked lemale bodies. The lense 01 his camera reveals much 01 the world 01 intimacy and privacy and converts it into a work that mixes the perverse with an aesthetic wish. This contradictory impulse that Henri
171
explored in The Interno (and preceded La celosía by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Farabeuf by Salvador Elizondo), shows the personality 01 the voyeur when he discovers a hole in the wall of his guest room . From then on the protagonist inverts the relationship between what is outside and inside as well as exploring what is determined by social conventions in order to consummate the possession 01 a woman through the eyes.