Timescape
With obstinacy, I pace through and record “timescapes”.
My energy is devoted in this way to hikes that can take anything from a single day to several weeks, as I make visible the time lapses of the spaces traversed.
My immersion in nature is what constructs the frames of the images I produce.
The experience of this physical commitment to the elements is impressed on my images, which are recordings of the ephemerality that characterises the living, and the continual flux that animates it.
Through walking, I dialogue with each space that I perceive and traverse, so as to make of the landscape a work.
For this purpose, my mode of operation consists of moving a certain distance between images, and, for each motif, exposing the same negative either 6 or 9 times.
A temporal stratification of a general sum of memories and experiences is thereby made visible.
This multiplication of the initial image means that part of it disintegrates on the negative before taking concrete form.
As I bring the composition into being, what occurs is a superimposition of a geological time scale onto a human time scale.
Several seconds or minutes may pass between exposures, and the result is an oscillation of the photographed subject.
I fully accept the indeterminacy inherent in this process, which allows me to concentrate on the subject of impermanent nature, apprehended as a vibratory body.
This fortuity generates a tension that partly negates the nature of the image as a “decisive act”, dissimulating the purely perceptual data and opening new horizons to metaphysical interpretations.
Eric Bourret, 2011
Eric Bourret was born in Paris, France, on 10 March 1964.
He lives in Marseille, La Ciotat, and the Himalayas.
