Our collaborator Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret has published an essay on photography with Editions Douro, facetiously titled La chambre obscure : visages de la photographie contemporaine ( The darkroom: faces of contemporary photography). He sent us this text on the subject.
From One Room to Another
Forging paths from so-called scholarly or purely discursive forms to simple ones, photography always has something different to show. For the photographers featured in this book, the already seen disappears. These creators are not content with simple variations on the repetition of photography’s early discoveries. Supplementing the image on one hand, supplementing reality on the other, they prove that imagination is not dead.
However, it is currently fashionable to act as if everything about it is self-evident and as if the rules in vogue are perfectly known and accepted. The fact remains that in all these options heavily shrouded in technicality, we forget that photography is not an object without rough edges or surprises and cannot lend itself to all manipulations.
Photography, placed on the side of doing and studying, is a practice that, with time and its progress, is not enough for a synatxe à la Vaugelas. Indeed, in the field of images, it evolves. So much so that to the Grammérian we must prefer a Grévisse who can follow constraints but without bending so much to them, in the ambiguous activity of the 8th art, various fields intersect social, political, economic, etc. But the marks of its excess sometimes push its language into its entrenchments by recalling what happens here: the photographic vision is not there to decline reality but to metamorphose it.
Unlike Roland Barthes, who primarily relies on his perceptual experiences to differentiate photography from other images, the distinction he draws between the studium, which refers to a given referential content, and the punctum, which refers to the perception of a detail that suggests the off-screen aspect of the image, is no longer sufficient. The photographic image reveals a spatial and aesthetic value much more than a temporality and an attestation of reality. And the same is true of the value between shadow and light. In short, between Barthes’ perspective and this book, there are two separate chambers.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret, La chambre obscure
Editions Douro, 2025
112 p. – 13,00 €.
https://www.editionsdouro.fr/Jean-Paul-Gavard-Perret
