Horst P. Horst
Lucia Bosé
c. 1950

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
1975

“How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the - I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?”

— Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, Second Edition & Literature in Secret (Religion and Postmodernism

Berenice Abbott
Parabolic Mirror
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958–1961

Paul Klee, The Cat, from Some Poems By Paul Klee, trans. Anselm Hollo

[x]

Ralph Gatti
Billy Wilder, Michelangelo Antonioni and Satyajit Ray having coffee on May 14, 1982, during the 35th Cannes Film Festival
1982

John Rawlings
The artist Marisol in her New York City studio with her sculptures
1962

Wish for nothing lest you mar
The perfection in these eyes
Whose entire devotion lies
At the mercy of your will;
Tempt not your sworn comrade, – only
As I am can I love you as you are –
or my company be lonely
For my health be ill:
I will sing if you will cry
…I


Never hope to say farewell,
For our lethargy is such
Heaven’s kindness cannot touch
Nor earth’s frankly brutal drum;
This was long ago decided,
Both of us know why,
Can, alas, foretell,
When our falsehoods are divided,
What we shall become,
One evaporating sigh
…I

W. H. Auden, Postnoscript, an excerpt from “The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest”, from Collected Poems of W. H. Auden, trans. Edward Mendelson