For the last five years, Cantoni’s main enterprise has been to translate news photographs – quite literally, without prettification or editorializing.

Even at its most expert, translation entails damage – little losses and shifts of meaning. Cantoni’s process makes that damage visible. His “Burn Drawings” seem to have survived some strangely delicate conflagration – the result of Cantoni’s unusual medium, sunlight directed through a magnifying glass, graphite powder and vellum. The surface of each drawing is tattered, singed, and frail. Often the vellum has burnt clean through, leaving irregular holes, like lacunae in antique texts.

What Cantoni does is in fact, a form of “untranslation”. He makes a visual lingua franca-the iconography of the New York Times, less intelligible. What had been documentary, authoritative, and institutional, becomes vulnerable, coy, and idiosyncratic. What was infinite becomes unique. Cantoni preserves the images, but he changes their qualities. One of the effects of this change is to return to us a fresh sense of the strangeness of the original event. Perhaps we remember a dead boy, stretched out on the streets of Genoa. Perhaps we can imagine the fate that awaits a somber soldier, with his Yankees cap and rocket launcher. The punctured surface of Cantoni’s drawing amplifies our forebodings. But above all, it reminds us how little we know, how far away we are.