Editions Noir sur Blanc offer Les Garde-Temps, a book by Luc Debraine.
Les “Garde-Temps” (Time-Keepers) here are clocks that keep precious time: those of memories. They have been stopped short by natural or human disasters, from the Titanic to Hiroshima, from Buchenwald to the towers of the World Trade Center. They still display fateful moments. They were also stopped voluntarily to mark a revolution, a liberation, a singular event. These timepieces are sometimes out of order, but their silence says a lot about extraordinaries destinies. They are kept in public places, museums or private homes. They are united by a will: not to forget.
Through photography and text, Luc Debraine composes a fresco of these silent witnesses of history. He takes advantage of his quest, carried out for two decades around the world, to question the deep nature of photography and time. Taking a still image of a clock that stopped is like pausing time twice. The gesture makes it possible to understand that photography and watchmaking, two arts of time, have much in common. Roland Barthes noted it: a camera is a clock to be seen.
Luc Debraine is the director of the Swiss Camera Museum in Vevey. He is also a journalist, photographer and curator. He was a lecturer in visual culture at the University of Neuchâtel, as well as a member of the editorial staff of the newspaper Le Temps and the magazine L’Hebdo.
Luc Debraine : Les Garde-Temps
Preface by Etienne Klein
Editions Noir sur Blanc
124 pages
ISBN : 978-2-88250-839-3
29 euros.
www.leseditionsnoirsurblanc.fr
