Each of my 15 photos is accompanied by a poem to be discovered with the entire photographic work.
My 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.
