Alien Love brings together two series by photographer Sacha Goldberger: I want to believe and Extra Not So Terrestre. In the first, Sacha invites us to look for a way to break free and escape our condition and our immobility. The 23 black & white silver photographs testify to the loneliness of an alien after the end of a world, lost on a planet where drought has destroyed everything and on which the oceans have completely disappeared. But far from what might at first glance look like a simple bitter observation about climate change and its long-term repercussions, Sacha offers a fable as poetic as it is comical to describe this inner conflict between good and evil. Above all, he offers us, as usual, a cinematographic vision in which the codes of the western, which he particularly likes, describe this duality which inhabits each of us, but also the expectation, with surfing and skateboarding in trompe l’oeil, between hope and respite, and the death of the father with the assassination of the Tarantino-style cactus. ( A few numbers for this series: a team of 7 people, 1 year of work, 120kg of luggage, 2 extraterrestrials, 1 flying saucer.)
With Extra Not So Terrestre, the second series of Alien Love, Sacha Goldberger continues to use the codes of the feature film to describe the deserted Earth after an alien attack. And if each project is a new adventure for the photographer, different from the previous ones, the two dreamlike series of this book are intimately linked. Change of scenery, chroma and staging in this series of 26 photographs and 8 soap-opera style color portraits: in the surroundings of a diner on the edge of a Californian desert, Roswell is having a good time time. He attacks the earth with cooking utensils — UFOs look more like stainless steel colanders than high-tech vessels — and turns men into cactus with a hair dryer. A great seducer, he saves the lives of a handful of women, but “only one can remain”! (The series in a few figures: a team of 35 people, 3 years of work, 7 models, 5 vintage cars, 26 costumes.)
Biography :
Weaving through emblematic eras, costumes and settings steeped in history such as Jacques Couëlle’s Villa Goupil, Oscar Niemeyer’s PCF headquarters, Alvar Aalto’s Louis Carré house, the Château de Thoiry or the Maison -Atelier Marta Pan by André Wogenscky, Sacha Goldberger redraws History in a poetic way by superimposing the limits of fiction and reality. “With each shot, we discover a photo that is not a photo, a drawing that is not a photo, an unshot film, people whose only reality is to inhabit his brain. » as Alexandre Jardin, who signs the preface of Alien Love, so rightly points out. Sacha Goldberger won the Ministry of Culture prize in 2021, 1 building, 1 work with his Les Compagnons Renaissance project. He is now a Leica brand ambassador.
Preface by Alexandre Jardin:
Normals people scare me, they tolerate reality. Sacha Goldberger’s madness calms me down.
He contests the real the right to have the last word. Apparently, Sacha is a photographer. In truth, he is against depoetized life. Against all perfidious forms of limitation. Against impossibility. Against the non-introduction of freedom into visual fields. So that gives hallucinated photographs that have the grain of reality, the smell of real motels, the nonchalance of real extra-terrestrials on the go. The material he scrutinizes is mixed to “give the impression” that his fiction has more reality than his baker. He persists in swindling our eye, to gently pull over the wool so that we end up saying to ourselves“hey, you guy, I know we are in the real fifties”. It doesn’t look like a film from that era, it looks like period reality that would dream of inspiring films. We slip into an improbable possibility. The cops are hybrids of movies and “real cops”. Are we already in the drawing? Almost, since life is a successful design.
With each shot, we discover a photo that is not a photo, a drawing that is not a photo, an unshot film, people whose only reality is to inhabit his brain.
Why does it touch my heart? Because I suffocate in the excess of reality. Like you no doubt, I am struggling in a world that stubbornly refuses to integrate enough of poetry to become breathable. So, when an athlete of beauty bends over backwards to erase the imbecile border between dream and reality, I want to kiss him. When he dismisses the dullness of the real to team it up with dreams, I tell myself that Goldberger is beneficial, one of those men who relieve poor humans imprisoned in platitude. his light also whispers that we don’t have to put up with the light of the metro, the corner tobacconist or your mother-in-law who decorates her interior with neon lights. We have the right to bask in the stunning beauty, to meander in the radiant nostalgia of the fifties. There, it is said. This guy born rebellious is right to laugh his head off so nicely, to escape the blandness and take Roswell seriously! To hell with the normal and the obedient!
Alexandre Jardin
Sacha Goldberger : Alien Love
Editions Revelatœr
Distributed by Art & Paper – Saveca
80 pages
Size 24.5 x 32cm
Revelatoer Editions
ISBN: 978-2-493152-03-9
Price: €45 incl. tax
www.revelatœr.com
