Time & Perspective Quote by Jacques Derrida

Control is the fantasy that photography politely indulges right up until it betrays you. Derrida is poking at the familiar ritual: you adjust the lighting, choose the angle, rehearse the expression, all to domesticate chance and fix meaning. Then the image comes back with an extra charge you didn’t authorize. That jolt is the “surprise” he’s naming, and it’s not just technical unpredictability; it’s ethical and relational. The photograph becomes a site where intention is outvoted.

The line turns on a quiet Derridean reversal: the subject you think you’re capturing is, in a sense, capturing you. “The other’s gaze” isn’t merely the person looking at the lens. It’s otherness itself - what resists your framing, what refuses to be reduced to your story about it. In a medium obsessed with possession (“I got the shot”), Derrida insists on the opposite: the image is decided elsewhere, by what exceeds the photographer’s plan and by how the photographed person appears as a presence with their own agency.

Context matters. Derrida’s broader project dismantles the idea that meaning originates cleanly in an author’s intent. Here, that critique lands in the everyday mechanics of images: representation is never neutral; it’s a negotiation with what cannot be fully represented. The subtext is a warning shot at every attempt to use photos as evidence, branding, or self-mythology. The camera promises mastery, but the face - and the viewer who encounters it - keeps reopening the case.