Each of my 15photos comes with a poem (to be discovered once you see the whole photographic work)
My
digital photographic work is based on old photographs of strangers. I collect
old photographs, file them meticulously and wait for a day they call out to me
and give me the desire to create from this simple visual medium. I'm always
curious about these ‘characters. Who were they? What have they done with their
lives? What were their desires? What sorrows did they have to overcome? Christian Boltanski liked to say that we die
twice: the day we die and the day someone finds a photo of ourselves and nobody
knows who it is anymore. But do we really know who people are when they are
alive? These photos, which often depict happiness, have a flip side. Working
from these photographs is a way for me to shape a story that lies in a
particular in-between with blurred edges: a story that could be at the
crossroads of theirs and mine. It is a visual dialogue involving tearing,
overprinting, cropping, cutting, negative exposure, overexposure. In a word,
make the photography reveal one of its possible flip sides through a series of
three figures (fig.1, fig.2, fig.3). These disappeared and unknown characters
acquire a new dimension: plucked from oblivion, their features - even if they
remain blurred - serve as a mirror for us, strangely echoing our own fragile
stories. My poetic creation is an equally particular process but more difficult
to explain. A word pops into my mind. An emotion accompanies it. I go hunting
for words, not to kill them but to tame them, to approach them and listen to
what they do not always say. I want to hear their whispers. I want to associate
them with one another, so that the emotion that presides over the creation of
the poem travels through these combinations. Let the emotion travel with us. As
this book of photo-poems is a wandering, a drift that leads to a place -
distant and near at the same time - that never ceases to elude us the closer we
get to it.
