It may be legitimate to suppose that the essence of photography resides in the decisive moment. Indeed, it is exactly the same to think of it as an accumulation of programmed moments, since what remains foremost in the photographic act is above all the desire to photograph, a product of the will.

The photograph is not a record of dead time, but rather the container of a story being shot exactly at the moment the photographer is present. A photograph simply contains a midpoint that directs us to a past and warns us of a future. In this sense, it is like a motion picture still, a place that provokes speculation about its relation with before and after. Hence Adsuara’s insistence on calling his photographs microfilms. They are without a narrative structure but they are part of a story that is inevitably enigmatic, inasmuch we know only its midpoint. These photographic stills are microfilms if we are willing to take the part for the whole.

Thus, microfilms might be considered stories whose meaning must be sought outside the frame, but they contain their own interpretative keys, placed there by the author in the act of photographing. These keys may be more or less obvious, in function of the number of stills required to tell the story. Perhaps it is necessary here to clarify a point that is no less true for being paradoxical: stories recounted by two or more photographs are more closed to the interpretive path, since the plurality of images complicates, obscures, and entangles it. Thus, the more photographic information there is – the greater the number of stills–, the more ambiguous the story is.

It is not the light of nature that generates an image, but rather the penumbra of culture that generates a story.