I told him, one day, halfway between sixteen and seventeen, I looked at myself in a mirror. I hated myself more than I felt anything about anything else. And I’ll never know why, though that day I realized it was terrible and useless to hate myself. I’d keep doing it, and I still do it every day of my adult life, though at least I know I’m doing it. I told him, I knew that day that I had wasted days. I had wasted thousands of opportunities to pay the world acts of goodness. Until maybe 2008 I went on living wastefully and terribly. Since then I’ve done good things whenever I can, even when it hurts me and ruins me. I keep them to myself. And one day, just the other day, in fact, I looked at myself in a mirror in Narita Airport in Tokyo, Japan, and I knew that I know something no one else knows; I knew that I knew something beautiful and wordless, and if I ever figure out how to say it, I’ll say it immediately. I promise I won’t keep it. If I die having never said it, that’s all right, because it wasn’t worth saying if I didn’t say it right. And if I figure out how to say it right, I’ll say it without hesitation, and someone will hear it, and they’ll someday fix a part of the world I don’t know how to see, and so on, until I’m far away and sorry.

In his essay “Photography,” Kracauer argued that the sheer accumulation—what he variously called “blizzard,” “the flood,” and the “assault”—of photographs in the press catapults this photographic archive of modern life into the realm of allegory. The multitude of photographs displayed in the press, according to Kracauer, forces the beholder to confront the truth of capitalist society: its mechanical superficiality, its banality, its spiritual meaninglessness. Photography, in Kracauer’s estimation, “is a secretion of the capitalist mode of production.” Only through a raw encounter with the surface nature of photography, in its accumulated emptiness, can the process of disenchantment and, importantly, change begin. At the heart of Kracauer’s thesis is a paradox: “In the illustrated magazines, people see the very world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from perceiving,” he writes, suggesting that seeing is not the same as being critically conscious of what one sees. Siegried Kracauer believed that the abundance of photographs, archived in the multiplicity of pictures magazines, appearing on newsstands month after month, year after year, could potentially catapult consumers into unflinching recognition of, and revolt against, a vapid, overrationalized society. Until that movement, however, the sheer accumulation of photographs offers an eternal, ever-renewable photographic present, repressing the lurking presence of transience and death by ever reproducing more, new pictures.