Search for content, post, videos

Paris : Arnaud Claass, photographs

Preview

Michèle Chomette presents until June 4th, exhibition devoted at French photographer Arnaud Claass. To present his work, Claass wrote :

I take photographs in order to apprehend the irregularities of daily life, and the resonances they create in us. My preferred subjects are the distinctive and the unexpected. The way I practise the act of recording – immediate or premeditated – is as literal as possible. The idea is that my photographs should be approachable.

Each time our eye is drawn to a situation, we get the impression, for some unfathomable reason, that it’s addressed to us directly. This projective phenomenon acts according to its own modalities: I express my experiences in such a way that they don’t remain purely private. My images seek to transmit the depth of our encounters with appearances, while exploring the density of the photographic sign. They’re at the same time observations and enunciations about the life of the eye. Like all “straight” photographs, they attest to something, from a viewpoint in time and in space. But they also attest to the viewpoint itself.

When photography’s the result of perception distanced from any intellectual preconception, any demonstrative desire or consciously programmed symbol, or, indeed, any intervention other than that of framing, it extrapolates a way of being in the world. In photography, as in other disciplines, sense generally seems to me to be richer when, avoiding the urge for control, it remains in suspended animation. All that’s required is to look at the way things occupy space, whether tranquil with regard to their immobility or carried off by their transient presence.
Rather than an “artist utilising photography” (a notion that’s always puzzled me), I see myself as a photographer utilising art. What interests me most is the history of photography, past and present. But other disciplines help me understand the nature of the medium, as I’ve pointed out in my theoretical work.

The practice of photography can be extended into narrations that are perpetually lacunary, starting up and slipping away. From this point of view, in its application of rigorous formal standards, I see it as being closer to writing than to other arts. But the day-to-day investigation of perceptual qualities doesn’t necessarily resolve into autobiography. And images don’t always tell the story of the person who made them.
There again, they’re never totally alien to it. They diffract it. In the work of the photographers I most admire, one can see, or at least guess at, how they live.

I’ve always produced large numbers of photographs. But each year I keep just the dozen or so that I see as having the greatest power. And this runs through my activity as a whole, which is governed by a certain state of mind: that of receptiveness to events. I came to the view, some years ago, that a larger number of my images could participate in effects of interactivity. With my collages, I observe the ways in which the images coalesce at a greater or lesser distance, as something like short prose poems that can be arranged into self-evident composite subjects, or diversities brought about by flows of consciousness. Photographs in reduced formats are offered for “reading”, separated by empty spaces or in tight groups. They participate (by contrast, as it were) in the formation of discrete composite units.

I also felt a need, early on, to combine these units with exogenous elements from newspapers, or other print sources. This means that signs can float freely, creating dialogues between my own images and others, between photography and words, between refined and impoverished materials, between precision and vagueness. They could be pages in the dream of a book without end.
Translated from the French by John Doherty

EXPHIBTION
Arnaud Claass
Photographs
From April 6th to June 4th, 2016
Conversation with Marc Donnadieu and Arnaud Claass on May 20th 6 – 8pm
Galerie Michèle Chomette
24, rue Beaubourg
75004 Paris
France
http://www.arnaudclaass.com

Create an account or log in to read more and see all pictures.

Install WebApp on iPhone
Install WebApp on Android