Photography is a leap that transforms time into space. A blink of an eye that endures, with no limit or boundary; you are on another planet, right here, in the reign of freedom. Are you looking for a clash of details? Here it is. The spellbound face of a woman? A city corner? The curves of a nude? Lingerie? A baby? Pyramids? A pensive artist? Again, here it is. All that was needed was to be there. How strange that no one is ever there.
Dominique Issermann seems to obey only two laws: the extreme privacy of an interior or emptiness outside. Human life is an incredible luxury, but it is fleeting and fragile. It is throbbing, and ever under threat. This plenitude in suspense is conveyed through contradictory photos: white turns black, black turns white. This luxury is endangered, the desert speaks. Nothing is at rest: everything soars in place toward aimless extinction.
1977, Twin Towers are ablaze in the fog, but look closely at the huge tracks left behind by insivible bulldozers. Twenty years ago, a felucca on the Nile sails into the light of millennia. Ten years earlier, the pyramids were already weathering a forgotten disaster. You may also imagine that, a traveler on earth, you land on top of Grand Central Station in New York. A silky-blond woman in black negligee awaits you in a hotel room; sun filters through the curtains; she is on her back, still wearing her high-heel slippers, and stretches her leg straight up over the bed, her face hidden behind a tangle of hair; you wouldn’t have her any other way, she is magnificent. Or yet (a masterpiece), what is the young woman, seen from behind, wearing a black hat and a necklace, doing on board a motoscafo on the Giudecca Canal in Venice? Has she just arrived, is she on her way to a rendez-vous? She is, indeed: with nothing. Life is this wonderful rendez-vous with nothing.
Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers is a French writer and philosopher, co-founder of the journal Tel Quel in 1962, and author of essays, biographies, and novels. This text was published in 2004 as preface to a special issue of Reporters Without Borders devoted to Dominique Issermann.
Dominique Issermann, At the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris
From November 3 to December 9, 2016
In the 8 airport terminals
Aéroport Charles de Gaulle
95700 Roissy-en-France
France
http://www.dominiqueissermann.com/
http://www.parisaeroport.fr/passagers/services/actualites/d-issermann
