Exposition collective | Visions Archipéliques | Fondation Clément
12 octobre - 29 novembre 2016
COMMISSARIAT : Dominique Brebion
Jean-Michel André (France) I Steeve Bauras (France) I Jean-Philippe Breleur (Martinique) I Ernest Breleur (Martinique) I Gilles Élie-Dit-Cosaque (Martinique) I Susan Dayal (Trinidad and Tobago) I Kelly Sinnapah Mary (Guadeloupe) I Pedro Farías-Nardi (Dominican Republic) I Mujesira Elezovic (France) I Olivia Mc Gilchrist (Jamaica and France) I Ebony G. Patterson (Jamaïque) I James Cooper (Bermuda) I Joshua Lue Chee Kong (Trinidad and Tobago) I Anabell Guererro (Venezuela) I Robert Charlotte (Martinique) I Polibio Diaz (République dominicaine) I Nadia Huggins (St Vincent & the Grenadines) I Élise Fitte-Duval (Martinique/Sénégal) I Jean-Luc De Laguarrigue (Martinique) I Gerard H. Gaskin (Trinidad and Tobago) I Lawrence O’Neil (Jamaica) I Ewan Atkinson I James Cooper (Martinique) I Dino Feigenspan (Martinique) I Jean-Baptiste Barret (Martinique) I Shirley Rufin (Martinique) I Alex Smailes I Stacey Tyrell I Marlon James
How
do you define your photographic project?
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| © jean-luc de laguarigue |
This project is the commitment of a
whole life, an imperious need and an opening towards new horizons, and probably
also the invention of a new language telling about my connections with
Martinique, with the burden of history and the untold story. This project that
I have never stopped illustrating under different shapes has finally filled a
gap, and doing so, has completed a journey in time, travelling back to the first
founding visions of a child in a plantation society in the final throes. The
original impressions of my young age have resulted in latent images and
questions that have left their print in my memory; I had to, somehow, as these
haunted me, develop them and extend them to give them some meaning, leaving
aside any emotional disorder. Today, I think I can admit that all I did was
photograph my childhood, not in some sort of nostalgia, but much more in the
idea of a construction allowing me to understand my own life and share it by
testing it in the present.
That
is probably the reason why I worked on series without any deliberate intention,
without scheming. They imposed themselves on me and that was that. Moreover,
they do not seem to reach an end and they never stop unrolling from one
scenario to another: each project, with no real chronology, contains the preceding
work, which contains the next, which refers to the first, on and on… Whether
each series can be dated doesn’t matter as it is the entire thing that matters
and makes sense when it is revealed. In fact, I frequently use some of my
photographs out of context and I use them again deliberately from one project
to the other; which means that I believe in the poetic energy of some images that will, once you
associate them with others form new meanings.
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| © jean-luc de laguarigue |
Nevertheless,
I admit that everything in my work started from portraits; meaning the
prodigious, necessary and arduous meeting with oneself. I think that in this
case, without having the capacity to define precisely the relation with others,
the idea, or more exactly the intuition of experience, of some final test,
seemed to me fundamental. Moreover, I had the certainty at the end of the 80s of
being on some untrodden ground, seen by few. In a postcolonial world our vision
was amputated by denial, rejection and low self- esteem. It seemed to me
important and beneficial to confiscate the portrait without any photographic
concern; I mean without any estheticizing idea enhanced, for instance by the
work on light in a studio: that being the reason why I strove to reverse the
technique. So, my models did not come to my studio, on the opposite I went to
meet them and photographed them mainly in their homes or where they lived, in
the light and atmosphere of their everyday activities.
During
all this period I worked with a film camera, a Hasselblad, a square shaped 6x6
camera for which I felt so much affection, close to devotion. With this I felt
again and again the emotion of the ‘first time’; without exaggeration it
beckoned me to some ritual of initiation that was needed to create the images
and that made every shooting solemn like a consecration.
There
was such a ritual using this camera, first loading the film on the film spool
holder with its empty take-up spool, unfolding
the protective paper, the small winding crank you turn to position the film on
picture 1, which required painstaking and sanctified skill. Focusing, the aperture
(f-stop) and speed shutter, the beauty of the moment included the specific use
of movement; a slight bending of your body synchronized with the movement of
your head so that your eye went naturally to the waist-level viewfinder without
losing the skyline. This particular sound of the ‘blad’ when pressing in the shutter release button, combined with
the simultaneous movement of the mirror flipped up out of the way of light path
and the opening of the light-tight flaps at the rear of the body, letting out a
pleasant phonic ‘slash’, hieratic, conquering and grateful as if the camera
itself thanked the photographer for honoring it. This humming sound was at one
punctuated by the slight click of the in lens shutter that consecrated the
importance of the moment. I used this camera in fact until 2006 on the
publication of my first book Gens de pays
–People from my Country- ; this was also a turning point, the moment when I
opted for digital cameras, and probably, along with this new technology a new
approach in my photographic work.
Can
you explain that thing so specific in photography that cannot be found in other
means of expression?
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| © jean-luc de laguarigue, "the rest". we have loved them |
That
question was asked to me by Patrick Chamoiseau in 2008, and I tried to answer
with my project ‘… the Rest’. I will not repeat again how
this 33 image collection was realized, but I remember the conclusion to my
text: one thing I feel ‘Irreducible’ in the specificity of my medium and that I
can formulate like this today: the possibility to bring together in the same
moment reality, time, chance and the eye. But the eye melted in the flux of
time and chance, changes reality and reproduces it in a new imaginary. From
this new imaginary emerge the photographic creation, its magnificent lie and
vast poetry.
So,
looking back, I realize that this project means leaving aside the film camera,
and that it heralds the end of the Kodak camera while at the same time coming
alive thanks to the digital camera with its fantastic technology.
A
great part of the photo practice has disappeared today; it has really entered a
new era, a new approach that is difficult to grasp and define for the time
being. The real question is what is to become of Photography, and then how
different will it be from the creation of purely technological fake images?
I
do feel too that with film cameras, what was’ specific to Photography’ and more
particularly to the use of negative films is powerfully related to temporality
that was one essential part of the choice of the final image by the
photographer. More than the necessary time for the shooting, there was the time
for the film development, then making the contact board in order to select or
reject images, and then indicating the choice on the tab, and then the time to produce
the final image that involved new difficulties. All these stages were capital
for the aesthetics of the image and the effect produced.
Concerning colour, I observe that every
film specialist had their own touch which every photographer could play with.
Progressively, the resulting colour was not the same either and you could note
the different shades according to the periods when colour was invented, from
the 40s, 60s, 80s… and so on.
Working with the digital has sorted out all
this and has invented software to produce effects: Palladium, Cyanotype, and
Polaroid, even if the range of effects is unlimited something has been lost.
I
have always been attracted by the uncontestable beauty of the black and white
negative, its mystery and poetry. These qualities appear only when it is seen
as it must be, in transparency through a ray of light. The effect of each ray
of light on their own shadows makes it alive and intangible like a dream, through
some angles of reflection; then comes the final picture in a furtive way,
grasped at once and then gone. It doubles the emotion of the shooting. It is as
secret as life; immanent, evanescent, delicate, ungraspable and perpetual.
Through chemical inversion it can be reproduced on paper. Today, the software gives
you the negative effect on screen, but it lacks the music, it has become a
partition on which the keys would be false: a bad reproduction of a singular
state which is its own. I also liked their smell, meaning their presence; the
smell of the 135mm film in its box is no longer the same and probably less
present than that of the 120mm film rolls to which we can add the smell of the
protective paper; but both of them when developed take on the same smell left
by the chemically processed silver salts. A magnificent state that we lose,
like many other acts with digital photography but which I find again with the
same emotion whenever I manipulate them, I find again their perennial
fragrance. A developed negative is the permanent quality of time, the promise
of a new day, the renewed pleasure of discovery; it is the enigma of the
chrysalis before its flight. Working with the film camera appears to me as many
enigmas to solve, a quest that enables me to have access to the marvels of the
world, to the inherent beauty of every being alive. This would have allowed me
most of my life to reach, without anything artificial a sort of trance, to be
in a daze where all my sensations aroused build up a field of knowledge that
invents and holds, in its way, a fertile love where death does not exists: this
is a song for life, full of restraint and made of humility.
When
and where does the photographer’s work start?
The
first ten years of my childhood went on without television but in a family
where image and reputation were very present. My father used to read quality
reviews such as Réalités, Planète or Connaissance des Arts - Realities, Planet or Knowledge of the Arts-
and so much more, a golden age for Photography, where well-known such as
Boubat, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry Burrows made the headlines; not to mention
the specialized press concerning this medium art, a sociological phenomenon in
the 60s middle-class. In one of those magazines, the publication of a
photographer’s work whose name I have forgotten, and entitled I think Le
Creuset got my attention. His photographs showed pictures of men and women
representing the diversity and wealth of the west-Indian population. The impact
was immediate: it was about not France or Indochina or these far away countries
that I did not know, but about my country that I had never left and that was
presented to me in its simplest daily life: I had then the certainty that this
was exactly what I wanted to do.
Then,
when I was eight I was given my first camera as a birthday present: a Brownie
Kodak. Using a ready-set camera was rather simple, only loading the film was a
major difficulty. These were film rolls, so it was necessary to place an empty
take-up spool under the groove knob of the spool clamp bar then insert a roll
of film under the other end of the bar. Using it the wrong way made the film
useless. The second aspect on this apparatus that required even more reflection
was the fact that winding up the film for the next view,
and the shutter tensioning protocol were two independent operations. And,
regularly I cocked the shutter in order to press in the release button having
forgotten to advance the film for the next view. This recurring lack of
attention produced on the pictures for which I had no talent for composition,
overlapping effects that made them even more confusing.
All
this obviously remains trivial, but the truth is that I chose Photography early
in the context that I have mentioned, and late professionally since I was 37
when I broke up with my activities and became a self-employed photographer. I
think that these long years of maturation were necessary to ‘start’ my activity
and finally understand what Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert expresses so cleverly:
“ The photographer’s eye is not so much sensitive to what is real or to the real light rather than the picture;
to matter and photographic light themselves. This eye of the photographer’s
that does not spy on the real and does not reproduce snapshots, but sees photos
and sees in photos, we can only call him photosensitive”.
Now,
I would not know exactly ‘where the photographer’s work ends’. I think he takes
part in a mise en abîme where
frontiers are always blurred. There is some perpetual renascence with a strong
impression of unaccomplished and the temptation of a new experience. I have
always wanted to write the word end to my work without being able to do it. I
might succeed progressively and the unaccomplished could continue one way or
the other. I also know, and that is the irreducible part in Photography that an
insignificant picture today could have unpredictable proportions tomorrow.
Therefore, the work itself is never finished.
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| ©jean-luc de laguarigue. Patrick Chamoiseau |
Traduction : Suzanne Lampla
