Exhibition nés
Exhibition une heure
Exhibition noir silence
|
|
| Photographs – Biography – Written texts Exhibition nés Exhibition une heure |
| Exhibition détenus Exhibition noir silence |
| For twenty years I have taken photographs of people's faces in an institutional background. I use the force of various institutions to give back everyone its most extreme uniqueness through each photograph. Each face is shown and claims its being here in the world, a face made of flesh, with eyes we cannot ignore. My photographs try to avoid all kind of psychologism or emotionalism, and do not attempt to reveal some so called interiority which would only be the projection of my own feelings . My work is not of a social kind either but tries to isolate and focus on the very person. Beyond appearances, it forms some sort of collective memory sometimes born from the fringes of our society, and restores faces to those cut off from the ordinary, visible world. I am mostly concerned with the relationship which we must constantly keep with every human face. |
 |
||||||
 |
 |
||||||
| In this context and with these intentions I carried out the project Détenus 1996, an abortive plan since it could not be achieved but which I take up again in 2005 as revealing the only face of itself prison cannot show, the face of locked up persons. None of these five persons is a frightening monster, each of them has viewed and understood my intentions, and has accepted them. It demands courage and sincerity to show one's face, at the risk of being recognized and branded as an ancient prisoner, an act which concerns all of us. For the five of them it is a matter of claiming they are human beings, in spite of the conditions of imprisonment which fundamentally often deny them this quality . The exhibition of these photographs is meant to acknowledge all this. Time has flown since 1996, the necessary time perhaps for these faces to become anonymous. The time for me to reconsider this project in the light of what I have done since. So the exhibition in Galerie Anne Barrault in autumn 2005 intends to confront these faces with various static videos shot in cities the names of which call up to mind prisons : Fresnes, Loos, Clairvaux, etc... The large colour photograph of a landscape in Scotland will show the horizon, that of a problematic figure such as seen in some films (Truffaut's "400 Coups, Loach's "Sweet Sixteen), a figure of liberation as well as of a dead end. This paradox shown in the exhibition introduces, once more in my work, a definite relationship between the face and the landscape, the reconstruction of a political space inscribed between these two figures. Philippe Bazin 1996/2005 |
|||||||