Before the Eye Lid's Laid

This fourth book by Agnes Geoffray La Lettre Volée offers a constellation of images and texts. The visuals of Agnès Geoffray’s artistic work are set in dialogue with short notes by J. Emil Sennewald, more poetic than critical, revealing the singularity of her writing. At the end of the book, an analytical text that takes an innovative look at the question of the act of image concludes all the exchanges. The story of the image could be summarized as that of violent acts. The image penetrates, the eye devours, the body undergoes, the gaze pierces.

Agnès Geoffray’s work explores these violent acts: starting from photographs found, she experiments this induced latency of images, which supposes a dramatic event to come. For the photographic image, this latency will be at the closing of the diaphragm of the camera or that of the eye looking at the photographed image. Incarnated by the flapping of the eyelid, this brief moment is the one before the eyelid arises. It is a pause. An intermediate moment between object and image, vision and look. A moment when one holds one’s breath.

Text in English, French and German.