Am I to be recovered from these resurrected pictures? Hours, days spent
shuffling photo upon photo, pausing on one, then another, staring at a face, a
tree, a horizon for minutes on end, laying them out on the table or the floor,
arranging and rearranging them in a neverending series of haphazard grids,
searching for that–that–which is not there, not in the image, but rather all-but-
there, out of the image, with the image, without the image. A void that seeps
through, burns through even the most opaque surface of these images
that can be no thing but surface to me…
— Roberto Valaco, Notebooks (I, 14a, excerpt)