Even the most authored of photographic images is part of this world, one of the “visibles.” I borrow this neologism from Alfonso Lingis, the translator of Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible. He coined it, I believe, in order to resolve an otherwise insurmountable problem: the problem of bridging the gap between the French word "visible," which can function both as an abstract and a concrete noun, and its English counterpart, which can only be an abstract noun. The dual status of the French word permits Merleau-Ponty to do something that the English word prevents, and that is as important to me as it is to him: to conceive of "the visible" as what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri would call a "multitude," rather than an individual, a collectivity, or “the masses.” All of the people, all of the time.

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