Meditations on Photographs: Frederick Lennart Bentley by Martin Roemers

 

Meditations on Photographs

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“The face,” Cicero (106-43 B.C.) is supposed to have said, “is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter” (“Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi”), and we know this as “the eyes are the window to the soul.” Scientists, oddly, seem to agree. And this is all fine, except that we have a problem here. What about the blind? Ordinarily, I don’t take those kinds of expressions for more than what they are. In particular, I try to avoid them in my writing, fighting my own hopeless war against cliché (in all likelihood a much paler version of the original one). But I saw this particular photography, a portrait of Frederick Lennart Bentley, taken by Martin Roemers and part of his The Eyes of War (which I reviewed here), and that’s the first thing that came to my mind (which, apparently and much to my consternation, is quite content with cliché). Find the full piece here.