Arles 2012: Brigitte Bauer

Brigitte Bauer – ENSP 1990
Up the Garden Path

One can recognize, in the images of Brigitte Bauer, a divide between the strong attention she pays to architecture, and a deep interest in the surrounding landscape, or more precisely in places and what they hold in terms of traces and history. On the one hand we discern a focus on design, on construction, on spatial composition, all of which call for a certain abstraction, not to say timelessness; and on the other, an emphasis on that which makes a place specific and unique for a short time, the perceptible sign of a moment experienced in real time. The photographs exploit the paradoxical complementarity of this relationship, albeit without defusing its freight of conflict or erasing its contradictions.

What holds on and even imposes itself as a harmonious entity is also subverted by the presence of a dissociative force, a discreet tendency to disperse and clash. Of course this has something to do with chance and accident but it also comes from the sly input of the photographer, who slips into the field of vision an element of play that comes close to stage direction. Here this inner skew gives rise to a narrative strategy, the jumping-off point for potential imaginings. Bauer’s garden is a meandering garden that invite us to move from one place to another thanks to a continuity that is in some ways virtual, always actualized in movement and travel, but powered by its own logic and energy—a logic and energy that are visual, or more precisely photographic. We are led on a ramble that takes us to sites always precisely situated in their relationship to buildings, to the sea, to a landscape, yet never trapped in a specific geographical locale. Seen this way, we are a thousand miles from a ‘catalogue raisonné’. What’s in play here has more to do with the succession of images, of editing in the quasi-cinematic sense of the term.

Jean Cristofol

Brigitte Bauer

Born in 1959 in Germany. Lives and works in Arles. After having developed a virtual culture of the landscape in her first photographic series—which includes Montagne Sainte-Victoire and Ronds-Point—Brigitte Bauer’s visual research now focuses more on observing human attitudes and postures, whether they be in urban, rural or leisure settings. While still images remain at the heart of her process, her more recent projects include video footage. Bauer’s photographs are regularly exhibited and are included in numerous collections, both private and public, such as the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and the Carnavalet museum in Paris Her principal publications include Fragments d’Intimité (Images en Manoeuvres, 2007), Fugue (Estuaire 2005), D’Allemagne (Images en Manoeuvres 2003), Montagne Sainte-Victoire (Images en Manoeuvres, 1999). Brigitte Bauer, holds degrees from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles (1990) and Aix-Marseille University (1995), teaches at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes.