For nearly twenty years, the artist Agnès Geoffray has been collecting evocative images and words and setting them in motion in her visual installations. The Centre photographique d’Ile-de-France is currently showing her work.
Before the eye-lid’s laid. The title of the exhibition encapsulates the idea championed by Agnès Geoffray: examining the moment just before our eyes are closed and the moment after, as the impression of an image persists. The artist thus deconstructs photographs that we are likely to find unsettling. In the back of the exhibition room, for example, she installed a slide show of images representing a man about to jump off the Eiffel Tower in the belief that his wing-suit will enable him to fly. This event did really take place in 1912. Franz Reichelt plunged to his death from the Tower. Agnès Geoffray reprised the film and decided to prolong the duration of the image showing the moment of final hesitation before he took the leap. “I was fascinated with this film,” she explained, “there is this brief instant when he hesitates, and you think things could have turned out otherwise, that Franz Reichelt could have changed his mind at the very last moment.”
Thinking photography
Time is suspended, as in the hunting scenes that the artist displays here and there, in which we see the hunted animal about to be killed, but not just yet. “I am looking for such moments of suspense. Just before a tragic event. The photograph is a standstill, but it is not frozen. It allows you to think. That’s what I’m trying to encourage. Rethinking an image through suspended time,” says Agnès Geoffray. This is also true of the found photograph of a hanged woman retouched by the artist. Agnès Geoffray removed the rope from around the woman’s neck, making us believe we are seeing someone in the act of levitating. This play with images seeks to unsettle the viewer, leaving a lingering impression in the mind.
Twins
Agnès Geoffray’s visual installations explore the darkroom of our intimacies. She tracks down shared topics likely to bring us together and adds a touch of the uncanny; for example, in the four photographs that open the exhibition. In the first, a pair of twins hold a framed picture representing a hand. The second photograph shows a little girl pointing toward something in the classroom while on the blackboard someone had drawn a monster. In the next photograph, we see another girl accompanied by an elderly woman who holds her by the shoulders while the child seems to be grasping an invisible object in her arms.
“Anything can happen”
Ghosts, specters, disappearances… The work of Agnès Geoffray attempts to open our perception to the “latency” of the image, the point of suspension in time, to what we do with it in our minds. “Suspense is a time of resistance. It’s a time where anything can still happen. For example, I took a photo of a falling skydiver, but in the photograph, he is suspended, floating. It is in that sense that I speak of the time of resistance: the tragedy hasn’t happened yet. It’s a time that is not yet a time of death,” she explains.
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin is a journalist, writer, and stage director. He lives and works in Paris.
Agnès Geoffray, Before the Eye-lid’s Laid
October 8 to December 23, 2017
Centre Photographique de l’Ile-de-France
107 Avenue de la République
77340 Pontault-Combault
France
