Cinemascope Photographic Journal
2008 – ongoing
The New World is the fifth installment of the Cinemascope Photographic Journal. This Visual Journal has been written daily since 2008, ever since a photographer friend gave me this rudimentary plastic film camera, a 24×36 faux panoramic, produced on a large scale in the 1980s and 1990s and distributed as a gift through subscriptions. A basic camera, intended to be used for souvenir and amateur photography—I like to place my artistic practice in this tradition. Its maneuverability and ease of use allow for a highly spontaneous shooting experience, in this impulsive instinct as close as possible to the moment being lived, with the least possible distance in sharing the experience of this subjectivity.
Remaining in this temporality of immediacy also means accepting the poorly framed horizon when the storm is too strong. These grainy images, anchored in the material of memory, slightly shaky, seemingly soft, are also sometimes false calms, like the visibly smooth surface of the sea which, however, is nothing but holes and ascending and descending movements: clashes illustrated by these fiery burns with explosive reds which sometimes disturb and streak the image. Unexpected entries of light which also speak of accidents, chance, the unforeseen.
The expanded frame of the panoramic, open to space, seemed to me to be a suitable means to accommodate and enclose the stretching of time specific to photographic instantaneity. The horizontal black bands encircle the image and give it a format close to Cinemascope, which contributes to making it drift towards fiction. Starting from the mundane to bring out the beginnings of possible stories, finding the balance between the already seen and the unexpected.
Composed of juxtapositions of sequences from everyday life, Le Journal photographique en Cinémascope is constructed in chapters, with this latency time specific to film, which leaves a temporal gap between the moment of the shot and its discovery as an image, and thus allows a scripting of reality. Although independent, each one wrapping around events that constitute important intimate landmarks – Les Temps calmes evokes the end of childhood and the romantic encounter, Le Voyage incertain re-invents a long journey abroad, Landed describes the trouble of discovering paternity, Le Conquérant and Le Nouveau monde draw the contours of a family life in telluric landscapes – these different chapters which follow one another chronologically form together a temporal continuity and interpenetrate in a fictionalization of the lived experience.
