Thierry Maindrault’s Monthly Cogitations
For some time now, distinctions and differentiations, which had already fallen out of fashion in recent years, have become truly obsolete, even being banned. Everyone must mold themselves into a uniform clone, as defined by an intangible intelligentsia. Uniqueness, so dear to the many generations that preceded us and to the essential rules of Nature, has become the absolute evil and horror. Everyone (all living species combined) must pass through the same mold. Originality is for the cloakroom and soon for the return to the stake, unless Mother Nature saves us with a last-minute intervention.
Each of us can see and realize that this diktat is imposed on creation, which is undergoing, in both form and substance, the evaporation of its freedom. Is it for the desire to please? Is it for the wish to get rich? Is it the thirst to stand out? The fact remains that we can only observe a very worrying leveling due to a poverty of imagination.
Thus, photography, although a recent addition to the closed circle of the (so-called major) arts, is sinking into this uncertain magma of so-called absolute art. To hell with powerful photographic expressions that challenge understanding and heighten emotion. The photographic image is drowning in a mixture of artifice and combinations that devour its originality and impact.
The fundamentals of photography remind us that the image projected or sealed onto a medium comes from the use of wavelengths (light), captured, stolen, trapped at a specific moment (with or without redundancy). The realization and sophistication of this expertise began less than two hundred years ago. The results obtained from this technique appear through numerous technologies that are often linked to advances in scientific research. But creation, in its expression, does not vary between the starting point writing with light and the final point the operational image. The result varies according to the mix of technologies used, which is not without importance.
As an aside, to understand this properly, photography follows the same principle as painting, sculpture, music, and all the other major arts.
Watercolor, gouache, oil, acrylic, and other components are applied to a solid surface with a brush, a knife, an aerosol spray, or even a gun! For painting.
Marble, bronze, plaster, glass, and other materials are shaped in space with a chisel, a stylus, a laser, or even a pestle! For sculpture.
This is true of all creations with a direct expressive purpose. Those that generate a dialogue between a specific work and individuals in their uniqueness. It should be noted that this personal exchange with the artwork is not necessarily pleasant for the person who consents to it.
Everything else that can be used to embellish a photographic image may be very appealing, but it cannot replace the essential elements and creates confusion between genres.
This new incentive to add anything more (?) to an image, even a photographic one, can only impoverish the message. Even when the basic image is already disastrous, which is often the case when this approach is used.
Painting on a photograph, embroidering a photograph, sticking sand on a photograph, scribbling on a photograph, cutting up a photograph, urinating on a photograph, covering a photograph with colored dots, etc. All these manipulations have always seemed superfluous, uninteresting, and destructive to the message of the image. Unless, of course, the image has nothing to say!
It doesn’t matter that some people find personal delight in these additional operations, which they themselves frequently perform in other contexts. We are entering the realm of decorative accessories such as tapestry for painting or modeling clay for sculpture.
This abuse becomes completely intolerable when people take it upon themselves to rob or to buy photographs, old or new, that they did not take themselves. The resulting damage, after their tearing, crumpling or poor painting, is unbearable to me. Whether the photographs thus mutilated are good or terrible, whether they are the work of a professional or an amateur, we must respect both their content and their form.
The second source of confusion lies in the presentation and supposed promotion of photographic artworks.
The presentation of our images is spread across two main vectors: hanging them on walls and inserting them into books or similar media. The image may be isolated on a section of wall or on a page. Our brain organizes its reading and understanding, aided to a greater or lesser extent by our author’s anticipation (composition, density, color, etc.).
So please, spare us the multi-layered artistic packaging, supposedly essential for highlighting our photographs. I never thought that photographs needed such embellishments. In this field of inventiveness for the optimal presentation of a photographic image, I have seen just about everything. The young prodigy who scrapes her violin with bow, sitting in front of a photograph lost on the wall. The dancer, descended from the stars in her “pas de deux”, who ends up seizing the photograph to make it her virtual lover. The couple of actors, in their agreed exchange, with knowing winks based on their (superficial) incomprehension of the photographic image. The master chef, a more or less Michelin-starred chef (him too), who boasts about his recipe in front of the photograph of an exhibition that advantageously replaces his battery of pots and pans as a backdrop. The unsung genius who imposes his morbid and often vulgar installation, which encircles, or even partially covers, one or more photographs in the exhibition. I almost forgot those abstruse and completely irrelevant texts that invade more than half of a book of photographs.
Photography is neither an opera nor a film. It is not a complex, coherent whole that constructs an ephemeral universe of atmosphere and context. Even if there is nothing to prevent it from participating in these kind of assemblages with their homogeneous rhetoric. Like the primary arts (I prefer the term independent arts), which are more or less enduring, photographic works are created by an author to foster a respectful dialogue (even if sometimes accusatory) with each viewer independently, through their own feelings and sensibilities.
Let’s stop putting people into uniform boxes. Let’s refuse the leveled and trivialized use of our photographic work (both creative and observational) to make it adhere to these various insipid patchouli blends of genre confusion. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” said Benjamin Franklin.
Thierry Maindrault. November 21, 2025
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