​Self-portrait - 1980

These notes do not have a precise function. They are a little nonchalant—this is not an essay, nor a university article. They were written between shooting sessions. They do not always have a direct connection to the images. These fragments signify that an image, while it exists on a light-sensitive surface, is a summation…a conglomeration of thoughts, reflections, and diverse theories that do not necessarily add up to a photograph, but are written in the margins, a sort of ocean floor that makes the froth visible on the surface.

 

1. On a TV show, Jacques Lacan says that you ask a question when you know the response. In the end, the commoner (that is, me) only retains his little bits of everyday philosophy and not the essence of his thinking, as happens all too often with thinkers. Words that one can also use with love... “In you more than you.”

 

2. Henri Cartier-Bresson. He approaches us with the somewhat irritating stature of an indispensable father who we would be wrong to disregard because he is the inventor of modern photography. His images “on the run” cultivate the banal, encounter the everyday. Someone had to invent it. His entire career is crisscrossed by two worlds. The first, his original universe, is that of spontaneity, unexpected encounters that create agitated, immediate images (motion-blurred), of sensitive and rapid construction (a sense of speed in these images). The second, the universe he acquired, let’s call it cultivated, classic, where the control over the frame, the polished tones, the pristine hierarchy of the darkroom, the depth of field, in other words mastery, predominate. An approach too Renaissance to be entirely honest.

 

2 bis. After H.C-B. (in terms of chronology), there is Robert Frank. In fact, in my heart he comes first. First of all, he invents subjectivity beyond objects and spaces. He shows that photography has nothing to show. He finds mental images. He accumulates materials, words, gestures. He introduces language, gives substance to photography, which is too often a shiny surface. In Photo-Poche, I look at number 56, Mabou. Nova Scotia and 63, Mabou, 1981. One is tempted to say “finally!” Starting with him, everything became possible. Be happy.

 

3. Phrases, just like photographs, should serve a purpose. For phrases, it’s easier. You just need to say them loud enough to be heard. Images, however, must silently breathe within us. They serve a purpose, but no one can say exactly what. “Every gambler takes a certain risk for an uncertain gain, and yet he is taking a certain finite risk for an uncertain finite gain without sinning against reason.”

 

4. Before H.C-B. and R. Frank, there was prehistory. Very moving! Talbot, Carjat, Nadar, Steichen, Weston… I also very much like Emerson’s Pond in Winter (1888). Deep down, I like them all, those who look through the keyhole. They open up light’s space. All those photos that describe our history. Now that there is television, describing nature is useless and banal. Photography can no longer belong to the narrative world (we tell children stories to put them to sleep; for one, we are no longer children, also, we do not feel like sleeping). Of course, the reality that seeps out of the small screen has no spirituality. Apparently, the spirit has become the domain of painters (photographers included?) and musicians. Rothko, Messiaen, and before them Chardin, Bach, for whom the abstract serves to create the supreme illusion. The fugue with its precipitous, scaled construction leads all the way to God. The trace of the paintbrush in the reflection of a piece of fruit, of a jar of olives, the transparency of colors that are up close only spots, pictorial matter, which later transforms into tangible objects, so gustatory and real that one must believe in miracles. Here, abstraction makes you salivate.

 

5. For Patrick Toth, it’s the experience that counts. A lost practice of sorts, but maybe we are all in the same boat. Do, undo… Sometimes he goes too far with provocation, derision, variations on 60’s artwork (School of Nice), but exciting for photography, which is rather retro. His images rarefy until they become almost sculptures. And then, he is my friend. My age, my generation. His confirmed solitude, his flight from Parisianism, a new form of global provincialism. But where is the capital? Where are the capitals of art? In the soul of certain people. No longer in the schools, or even in artists’ studios.

 

6. Richard Avedon. Not his last book, a catalog of twisted American mugs, caricatures that are rather impersonal. His previous book, Portraits, in 1976…Flaherty, Marilyn Monroe. Robert Frank (by chance?), Oscar Levant, Jasper Johns, and so on… I’m fascinated by the graininess…of the skin, the clothes. And the light in the eyes. There is a direct relationship between them and myself, as if Avedon didn’t exist; a very Hollywood conception of a fiction that hides the attached strings. Shallow depth of field…Henry Miller’s blurry shirt, something that stirs you but barely enters your consciousness.

 

7. In my eyes, the greatest painters paint without relying on a drawing. Chardin, Greco, Cézanne... The most rigid photos of H.C-B. come from his drawing fantasies, and his drawings bore me. Or rather, he should draw with the color itself, throw it on the paper (Pollock). Not this neo-Fauvist, mannered style…associated with amateur artists. Why not just throw developer on the photographic paper, throw the paper in the trash can, throw the trash can in the garbage dump, and wait for the archeologists?

 

8. Wölfflin: “In picturesque disorder, the representation of objects in themselves is not totally clear, but partially veiled. The motif of the veil is one of the most important motifs of the picturesque style. This style is very conscious of the fact that anything that can be completely understood at first glance is tedious in a painting… Objects are pushed in front of each other, they are only partially visible, exciting the imagination to picture what is hidden.” Instead of the picturesque, it would be better to say pictorial, for the discontinuity of drawing, the gestural matter…This was written in 1888. I want to find the pictorial in photography, without artifice, without tricks. Maybe in the backgrounds, or in Henry Miller’s blurry shirt.

 

9. Diane Arbus. Boundless passion for people. A true sympathy in the etymological sense of the word… Suffering together.

 

10. Bettina Rheims. Young photographer who is being talked about a lot these days. She doesn’t question the camera. She uses it like everyone else. The same frames, the same lights, for a century and a half. Infinitely criticizable. And yet, it works well. Beautiful images. Subjects with presence. Proof that there is no possible dogma, that the rightness of an image surpasses any theoretical notions, all the chatter about academia, modernity, etc. Just do it, any way it can be done. Truth spans all systems. That is, no doubt, what one calls talent. It incites humility. Every time we look for theoretical truth, practice contradicts it and a counterexample presents itself. Proof, perhaps, that a soul exists beyond the realities of the mind.

 

11. The most beautiful H.C-B. Midnight Mass at Scanno in the Abruzzi, Italy. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Photographer, page 101.

 

12. What can be said about Witkin? He consecrates the implosion of photography. Beautiful shades of black and gray. A dark universe that deep down I don’t really like. His approach, yes, his violence, yes. Perhaps too romantic, too chiaroscuro, his emphatic erudition (references to Goya, Miró, Picasso, Canova). I reluctantly admire his work. Very impressive, the little gnome of “Counting Lesson in Purgatory, 1982.”

 

13. I would like a decreasing tension, a depiction of calm with a sort of peach-skin texture. An image reflecting upon its future. The world wouldn’t be closed, but slightly open. I like the square precisely because it is at rest. It doesn’t pull towards any action. Only a sign attempts an elevation. Gray is its soul. It’s a surface.

 

14. Photography is nothing other than chemistry. The darkroom was used in the 15th century. This is why we are heirs to the Renaissance.

 

15. In 1986 I went to New York. These days, an ordinary trip. For me, it changed everything. I encountered the relationship between the city and Barnett Newman, Rothko, Clyfford Still. Of course, I knew them before but I didn’t understand anything before having seen the city. It is odd to note that abstraction (in this case, mystical abstraction) finds its basis in nature. Almost like Impressionists. Even Jasper Johns is very much a Naturalist. Description of walls, asphalt… Geographical maps, targets, numbers, words, etc. The verticality of the World Trade Center in Newman (or any other building, since he didn’t see that one), Frank Stella and his mise-en-abime in the lines of the buildings or his jagged geometric forms in sign-like pieces of sheet metal, (Pepsi-Cola, gas pumps).

 

15 bis. Clouds have already been cited as a clear source of inspiration for Sam Francis. He was in the U.S. Air Force during the Second World War.

 

16. The pleasure of abstraction cannot, however, come from what we can recognize, analogies with the real. This point of view also holds true for figuration. It’s not about resemblance. So, what is it? Mystery, initiation? An encounter with the spirit? This conflicts with my materialism.

 

17. Doisneau, Brassaï, Ronis, Koudelka, Kertész. A couple of lesser known photographers: Charbonnier and Tony Ray-Jones. Too many people, too many traditions, I’m obliged to get rid of them, too French as well. Now we hope to abolish borders, the exchange rates, national politics… Memories of 17th century Europe. Copernic wrote to Galileo. A scientific sum brought together by the Royal Society of London, pooling knowledge in the middle of wars, religious disputes (Pascal felt it was wise not to get too deep into Copernic’s ideas). Thus, all these photographers offer their images to the world, offer their tenderness to our common understanding. The pleasure is shared. It’s done in an atmosphere of childhood innocence… A narration where concepts do not interfere. This is photography’s foremost function, when there is no gap between usage and conception: pure pleasure, as with icons, perhaps.

 

18. H.C-B. (Him again!) “What is a photo-essay? Sometimes a single photo, with enough richness and rigor, and with content that has enough resonance, can suffice by itself. But this is rarely a given; the elements of the subject that create the spark are often sparse. We don’t have the right to bring them together by force, to stage them would be cheating (Why not? The photographer spends his time staging scenes), and thus the usefulness of a photo-essay: the page unites these complementary elements, spread over several photos.” And so in ’47, he exhibited three hundred photos at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and then four hundred at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1955. Photography was bulimic then. I dream of an exhibit with a single photograph (or two, to satisfy the curious).

 

19. Alexey Brodovitch. “To examine the photos during the course, first we pass them from hand to hand so that everyone is familiar with them, then we discuss them from the standpoint of the need to find a way to see in a novel way with a personal approach.” It would be better to try to see like everyone else. That would be truly singular. To see oneself through the eye of the world.

 

20. “Those who wish to devote themselves to painting should start by cutting out their tongue.” Matisse. And yet, he writes. How is it that often we want to do or say the opposite of that which we did or said? Is thinking that imprecise? When I assert something, I feel like trying the opposite. Perhaps therein lies a refusal of language altogether, a latent refusal, not under our control. In the same way, when I take a photograph, I feel like taking another that would be the opposite of the one I just took, which ruins any attempt at coherence. It’s so easy to take a photo. Must we favor experimentation or continuous creation in search of a focal point? By the way, Matisse was right. One should shut up when one creates images. But I’m afraid the image is too silent.

 

21. Deciding to write means suddenly deciding that my photographs have a “place on Earth.” Without writing, they don’t really have a value. They need to be accompanied by the thoughts that gave birth to them, because they don’t just fall out of the sky. This doesn’t grant them, however, any particular necessity. They are, that’s all. One has to accept it.

 

22. A photograph is perhaps equal to a reproduction of a painting in a book. It’s a painting that has cooled off. By the same token, it’s closer to a concept. In the future, it will be easier and easier for it to be appreciated as such. The magnificent range of grays also give it the austere allure of a thought. Of a thought… Let’s hope it succeeds !

 

23. Art can only really speak about itself. This is why form takes such importance, to the detriment of narration (of content). It is from this form that meaning emerges. It is drawn from the construction, the fabrication process, the quality of the pictorial imprint, chemistry, tone, in short, the signs. And what else can we do ? Does anyone care about the circumstances of the death of Sardanapalus? I’m rattling on about an idea that is already a given. However, it seems as though photography has dodged this development of ideas; it appears to be too naïve, often too simplistic.

 

24. I like photographic accidents, everything that exceeds technical mastery. A spot of developing agent, an unexpected shadow, etc. Being surprised by that which I didn’t anticipate. That’s where life moves in. Paradoxically, mastery of the image largely stems from this attention to what Raúl Beceyro calls “error” in his essay on H.C-B.’s photo Paris, Rue Mouffetard, 1954. And it’s this error—I prefer the word “accident”—that constitutes the image’s impact and gives its meaning its troubling aspect. In short, it’s the penetration of the unconscious that troubles what the conscious thought was so easy to say. It’s the mark of man and not the man himself, a veil in front of eyes that see too clearly. “Instead of showing a result, it (photography and its errors) shows a process, instead of a work of art, a structure.” It should be mentioned that all accidents are awaited, all accidents are voluntary.

 

25. A word about the work of August Sander and his catalog of social groups that he considers representative of turn-of-the-century Germany. He manages to literally twist photography and use it exactly as if it were a language where images were words. A series of images, carefully organized by category, a sentence. Of course, a photograph is richer than a word, it contains an ensemble of more complex symbols, where each element of meaning tends to slip away (the subjects’ clothing, their attitude in front of the camera, objects, type of landscape, etc.). It’s one of the rare photographic oeuvres entirely turned towards the hope of demonstrating something (however dubious). The facial expressions are impassive. In themselves, they do not convey the force of the image. The oeuvre’s ideology is apparent in the long run. As evidence, this note in the preface of his book “Men of the 20th Century”: “…hence his conviction that assassins had precise physiognomic characteristics. One day, he went so far as to publish the portrait of a man of irreproachable morals accompanied by the caption “criminal type”… He supplied Stuttgart editor Theodor Benzinger a few portraits that were to be placed in the middle of forty-eight photographs meant to educate the German people. He had no sympathy, however, for the Nazis. I’m always fascinated when I look at this book.

 

26. Photographers are slowly (lazily) waking up from fifteen years of bliss (1970-1985). Society opened its doors, its galleries, museums, magazines to them. New births were recorded as a result of this boom (Viva, Contrejour, Vu, etc.). In discovering the futility of photography (I’d like to believe that it just appears to be so), its naturalism, this same society is now turning away from them. It needs to be shown that photography deserves a better fate.

 

27. I return to the accident. An accident could also be called chance. And all photographers talk about chance, having the vague impression that the beauty of a cloud doesn’t really depend on them but on a combination of circumstances, as if some mysterious force was at work in them (in us). Matisse said that he believed in God while he was working. “When I am submissive and modest, I feel as though I am being helped immensely by someone who makes me do things that are beyond me.” “In art, truth and reality start when you no longer understand what you are doing, or what you know.” He talks about his hand like another self: “If I trust my hand when it’s drawing, it’s because while I’m getting it used to serving me, I force myself to never let it prevail over my feelings. I can tell when it’s paraphrasing, when there is a disagreement between us, between it and the whatever it is in me that appears to submit to it.”

The accident, chance, is an Other in myself that I seek to subdue. An extravagant struggle. It’s rare that an image is born of consciousness. It becomes apparent to consciousness in retrospect. Thus, for an image to form, it has to come from a sort of elsewhere, in other words, beyond consciousness, beyond the eye. Paradoxical photography of objects that have not been seen. We look through the viewfinder and see nothing. This phenomenon is reinforced by reflex cameras, which obscure the viewfinder when the shutter releases and the mirror rises up. This is a reality, annoying at first, because it goes against the idea of seeing, of quickly capturing, but more real if you truly understand this absence of capture as using the imponderable talent of the unconscious. Yet, this unconscious has the ability to be reproduced.

Great artists are at the origin of numerous masterpieces, proof that somewhere in them exists the possibility of subduing chance, of making the hand submit to the accidental repetition of acts of genius. All this ends up creating pandemonium, in which it is difficult to figure out who is working. Me or me?

 

28. These writings amount to a protest…against what is, for what isn’t. It attempts to show that photography too, contains academicism. It rejects that which is called quality, professionalism (which is as boring as the spirit of enterprise, bourgeoisie…). It attempts to describe a different kind of pleasure (even if it’s just rumbling noises) rather than just acquiring the savoir-faire of others. It will only truly take shape in photographs, in this classic space that I try to disturb, that I try to play with like a binocular space where the surfaces and signs are in movement, not in the form of a kinetic illusion, but by taking on the defects of an optical system that is, essentially, less fixed than it seems.

 

29. A photograph is made up of a delicate network of grain. I find this meaningful. It’s the pigment of the image, the envelope that must be broached to touch it, to know it. It is the fundamental element, absolutely abstract. Its presence impedes a literal description; it transposes and kills realistic narration. It gives equal value to objects and shadows, destroying all hierarchy. Each grain plays the same part in creating illusion.

 

30. I am looking for an effective critical method. Not finding it anywhere, I take refuge in the admiration of absolute thinking. For example, number 233 of Pascal’s Thoughts, the famous Wager, where the quality of his reasoning, of logic, become a sort of vertigo. And his thinking, in itself, becomes the performance and not the content of the debate (the existence of God, a devotional life, asceticism in the case where reason—or rather the will—triumphs over the real, I mean the absence of God. My interpretation.) It is the spiritual gymnastics that are so fascinating, the quality of the language, just like an image is beautiful for its components more than what it is trying to say. So I dream of images that could fix such pure reasoning, as if a link could be made between a thought, a logic, and the image that would flow out of them. For example, I am troubled by the Cistercian monks who, following Saint Bernard, rejected art and all representation of the world because they judged that the Church, with its luxurious excess (the Gothic), offered an image of God that was too rich, too overwhelming. They fled this world, retreated into monasteries that were constructed in the image of this idea, that is to say on a human scale, without decoration, without sculptures, without portals, with only angular stones and simple architectural proportions. Yet it is troubling to realize to what point this space is filled with a religious soul, a true devotion, with a beauty that is even more impressive because it is unadorned, austere. This means that by declaring a negation of art, they built what are perhaps the most beautiful works of art of the Middle Ages.

 

31. To realize his ideas, a painter needs colors, pencils, etc. A technical arsenal, a science. A photographer just needs to let a little bit of light into a box and everything’s been said. This is where his superiority lies.

 

32. I’ve looked everywhere, but I haven’t found a single photographer that I can defend wholeheartedly. I can only find pieces of what I’m looking for. This was not the case when I started taking photos fifteen years ago. Then, the exploration of images was based on certainties that had been dictated to me by History and that I could not call into question. I was happier, in fact, with these certainties. I was happy to copy, to try to pull myself up to the level of those masters who drew me into their world. It is not the desire to distinguish myself that drives me towards other paths. I don’t really care if I am someone special, different, or unique. I am much more impressed by the life of ants, of bees, of animal colonies where each finds his place, which seems to be determined in advance. To me, the security of law is superior to the immodesty of individual destinies, of creative turmoil. But this happens to me on another level, completely beyond my control, where the imitation of others plunges me into uneasiness. It’s as if all of these artists’ paths were directed towards seeking a unique truth, one that is renewed in each era, and that this truth, impalpable and venerable, has an imperious, necessary flavor, without it being possible to know its nature nor its basis. Devoting myself to this idea, this almost comic search (since after all, obligations coming from so high up seem comic), I find myself there, in the domain of images, stupid and intimidated, hoping to make a tangible discovery that I can share with others, one that surely would have more to do with pleasure than with the austere image of a god, be it art itself. Yet, tradition is essential to me. I cannot cut all roots, eliminating in a single stroke those who make or made photography what it is today. Undoubtedly, somewhere within them is my foundation and much of my pleasure.

 

33. Radio station. Interview with Jackson Pollock:

“So, deliberately looking for meaning or a recognizable object in an abstract painting immediately stops you from appreciating it the way it should be appreciated.”

J.P.: I think you should enjoy it like you enjoy music. After a moment you either like it or you don’t. After all, is it that important? I like certain flowers, not others. I think that at least painting gives…at least give it a chance.

 

34. When all this started (these 6x6 photos, these stripped-down squares) in October ’86, I was seized with a sort of hatred, a disgust with photography as it was practiced, a hatred of this maniacal way of looking at the world, these formal ratiocinations of clumsy bodies, in a composed rectangle. This feeling is no longer so virulent. Which allows me to see my work not as a revolution, but as a new space for a new way of working. I am driven towards awareness, glimpsing therein discoveries that are purely plastic, seeing here and there a space in movement (that moves forward, backward, then flattens out), also seeing the evolution of values (the grays come forward, the whites recede). I focus on infinitely simple elements that are not, strangely enough, deprived of emotion. Basically, it’s only now that I feel like I’m starting to understand the photographic world as a pictorial world and no longer as a descriptive world, where photography will finally be, as Godard said, “just an image and not an image that is just.”

 

 

Denis Malartre, 1988

Translation: Margie Rynn