How did the landscape enter your image world ? Was it from the start the object of your work, or were you diverted to it from some other subject?
I had, long ago, done a lot of landscape drawing, maybe because I was very receptive to the impressionists. The landscape was, indeed, a global impression. A whole deposited on the earth that I, in turn, could deposit on paper. The landscape had no limits, only a distance, and that was what I preferred. I liked to represent how far my eyes could see, to draw a fuzzy horizon, knowing that beyond that uncertain line things went on. Later, I began to take photographs, maybe more of the countryside than of the landscape, for its light, for its atmosphere. With the camera I had to cope with the frame, I had to exclude, to see what remained. I was rather puzzled, and not very gifted.
You mostly use dark chamber photography. You have co-signed some video and pinhole-camera work on Polaroid with Marie Combes. What landscapes call for one or the other technique, and why ? Are some landscapes imagined moving, and others frozen still? Are some landscapes by essence in colour and others in black and white?
You are right, the landscapes do the asking. I adopted the dark chamber to get away from the spontaneity of the 24x36 camera. To escape from the « decisive moment » culture I was trained into. This is quite paradoxical, as I was working in the undergrowth, on the unbounded tangle of a seemingly unruly vegetal world. Using a dark chamber requires some serenity, anticipating positioning and framing, complex manipulations. The dark chamber does not encourage movement. All around me I would hear sounds, I would be aware of the quivering of nature, the urgency of life. I could feel that all this vegetal and animal world and myself were going about our business, but in different time-lines. I am not a colourist, and when I picture, I picture in black and white. But it depends how a photograph is considered. Black and white offers a dissimilitude, maybe more fertile to the imagination, maybe more timeless. Whereas colour may add another language. In 2007, with Marie Combes, we were exploring the photographic medium, more than the actual image... We worked with a pin-hole camera on Polaroids. It was a weird experience, dealing with distance. Like when a landscape seen through the windscreen catches your attention, you stop and get out of the car, and the visual impression has gone... With a pin-hole camera it is not possible to organise layers of space in the image, or to know what colours will result from a random exposure time, the relative position of the sun, and the chemistry of the Polaroid. But most of all, we were perturbed by the long exposure, ten seconds to several minutes, we physically experienced this, knowing that during this time an image was coming to life, practically without any action on our part. It may be an intrinsic quality of photography to signify time, beyond what is shown.
Your work on the landscape gives food for some thought on time. In your pin-hole camera images and your videos you unfold the landscape. For Montromant, you filmed infinitesimal changes in light for over 3 hours. What experience of time does a landscape give you to see ?
Looking at a landscape is a complex process. The eye goes into the distance, lingers here and there, wanders away again, hovers over details. This movement between the eye and the brain, bridging gaps and discontinuities, creates the whole, the landscape. After the pin-hole camera experience, Marie and I wanted to see how time and duration relate. Technically, « Montromant » is a three hour photographic sequence, during which we took a photograph at irregular intervals. These digital images were edited using cross dissolve, projecting the landscape in a thirteen minute video where the duration of light variations are credible to the eye, although the actual time has been compressed. Cross dissolve shows images appearing-disappearing, deletion of an image so that the next one can take its place. It is indeed a way for the landscape to creep out of its folds by proximity with contemplation, to be and not to be there.
Your recent work is on soils. Landscapes and soils are very much linked. How did this shift come about? What material do you find there? What memories of the landscape are written into the soil ?
They say an image often contains the next one. I believe that beyond the pretext of the subject, the artist is there to show, to materialise something he is not aware of and that belongs to the medium, the shapes, the light. The series on soils in black and white gets rid of the distant, to try to find a landscape at a different scale. Here I again work with diptychs, maybe to remember they are only fragments, not to be misled by the false whole with its two perspectives. Sometimes there is a bad cut, a repetition of a part of a photo in the other, two identical details, but in a different moment, a few seconds before or after. Such accidents, such random occurrences, are very precious. There was also a certain frontal approach in the image. I tried to develop this by photographing the soils from above. But this did not work properly in black and white, and I had to work in colour by necessity, and for the first time I came to worry about colours. The soil is the living memory of places. It is the depositary of time, of our activities, of traces, it moves and changes shape, new sediments settle in. A machine will plough it around, lay down asphalt, things will disappear, we will forget, and then it will all start over again. Soils are like a film that continually records prints, changes in light, the passage of time.
You also looked at the idea of ruins in the landscape. In particular in rural landscapes. What was the origin of this interest? Is it another aspect of your preoccupation with the folds of time?
This is very difficult to answer. We had a project in this field, but I think it was too ambitious for us. We thought we could work on a subject that would go beyond the fashionable “ruinism”, aesthetising industrial ruins. We wanted to use a wonderful and moving text by Diderot on the feelings ruins evoked in him. This has been a failure, I think we did not leave enough to chance, we did not keep our minds open enough, we wanted to master the subject, to illustrate the text, in short too much prejudice and presumption.
To conclude, I would like to discuss how the landscape relates to the contemporary. Agamben wrote : « Contemporary is he who is hit full in the face by the beam of darkness coming from his time ». What contemporary do you see in the landscapes you film or photograph ?
The video scene is, I believe, more keen to explore and less embarrassed by market constraints than photography. Video creates a different language than cinema, in particular with respect to time. A different space also, where the frame loses power and bursts out of the screen. A video camera can be placed anywhere, and when it is placed on the body it becomes its extension. This is fascinating, it changes the outlook of the spectator, as well as his temporality. The spectator is no longer bound to the place assigned to him by perspective since the Renaissance in Europe. It seems to me that being a contemporary does not consist in filming or photographing our present, but in seeing the links between present and past, in being a transition, in becoming a bridge, but a bridge constantly and simultaneously made and unmade, not knowing where the other bank may be...
Interview made on 26.03.2014
by Chloé Dragna.
La Vidéothèque thanks John K. Olliver for the translation.