The Camera Obscura gallery presents a retrospective of Bernard Descamps. The director Didier Brousse gave us this text:
Photography is a kind of alambic in which, in its successive transformation chambers (the eye, the camera, the darkroom), is extracted the substance from the flow of images that passes through us every second and give them meaning. and presence.
It is an essence of the gaze, slowly distilled.
The material that feeds it is obviously essential, but the final result is obviously due to the work of the alambic, to the style developed over time by the artist.
Bernard Descamps is certainly a traveling photographer, keen to travel the world to find his subjects, under different skies, but he denies any documentary desire: “I produce images that tell nothing… I only travel to meet myself, to find my images, those that are in me and that I tirelessly try to bring out”.
If the photography of Bernard Descamps, according to his credo, does not tell us stories, it cannot escape its primary quality of trace, of clue: it speaks of the places crossed, of the characters encountered and it is this richness of meaning, underlying the form and associated with it, which constitutes the strength of this work.
His work on the Niger River, on the forest of the pygmies, on the Moroccan Atlas, on sacred places in India, remain like intimate encounters, quasi-literary evocations (how many possibilities of novels in these images!) that inhabit us and feed both imagination and knowledge.
The work of Bernard Descamps is, it seems to me, a very fair balance between the two strings that vibrate in us thru photography: that of visual pleasure and that of our imagination.
Form and openness to the world are the two pillars.
Didier Brousse
Bernard Descamps : Essentiel
Until May 27, 2023
Galerie Caméra Obscura
268 Boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris
01 45 45 67 08
www.galeriecameraobscura.fr
