Roger Shuttuck explains what "image" meant for Proust:
Like Locke and Condillac (and later Sartre), Proust saw our image-making faculty as a means both for grasping the world and for detaching ourselves from it, the essentially double process of consciousness. Inevitably "image" spawns a large family of photographic terms: photographie, épreuve (proof), cliché (negative), instantané (still or snapshot).
Roger Shuttuck, Proust's Binoculars (1962)
In a reverse effect, so to speak, photography is essentially ambiguous; it mediates us to the reality of the world, and it profoundly separates us from the world as is.
