The fourth photography book by Guillaume Geneste, Trop n’est même pas assez (“Too Much Is Not Enough”), from the Collection ” Autoportraits de famille ” (“Family Self-Portraits”) published by Filigranes Editions is now available.
That’s it, it’s over, so everything can continue, and start again differently – surprise expected for the winter of 2020.
Twenty-four years, in a four-volume family saga (1992-2016), the last delivery (2012-2016) appeared in the form of a small green book.
The Geneste family (Colette, Guillaume, a girl, a boy) has grown considerably, the children born in volumes 2 and 3 look more and more like their parents and will soon be on their own.
Using for title a word taken from Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, Trop n’est même pas assez, (Too much is not enough), this opus loyally extends the inaugural principle of the series: that the photographer is always present in one way or another in his images, if only on tiptoe.
Over time, the bodies are less naked – children are often embarrassed by the intimacy of their parent – a little more restrained perhaps – the effusion and incessant kisses are mostly in early childhood and first couple years – but the family is still there, united, in travels, in France (Batz Island, Marseille, Biarritz, Trouville, Le Crotoy, La Rochelle, Montpellier) and abroad (Portugal, Italy, Crete, Japan, Germany, Ireland, England, United States), and in everyday life in Paris.
Dramas and disappointments may have been experienced – who knows? – but the important thing is to welcome everything together, adversity as simple happiness.
The tone sometimes seems a little darker than in previous volumes, but as long as we brush our teeth together around the same basin, everything is fine.
As in haptonomy, the essential thing was to ensure by touch a basic security, so that the child access without anxiety his full autonomy.
That is why there will be no immediate follow-up to this intimate odyssey, whose small planets will soon evolve independently.
While waiting to separate, the black and white, which does not pass like the colors, offers at every moment its chance of immortality.
There are ghosts in the mirror, Egyptian gods, and bewitchments.
Some bananas in a dish placed on a dresser: it is an offer on an altar that overhangs an ex-voto.
Guillaume Geneste photographs his own, who, in pictures, are already shadows producing shadows.
Fraternity of the binoculars, dance of the specters around a volcano, laugh of great living that rinses the Italian rains.
The bodies are together, but it is above all the same spirit that hovers over them, even stronger than the caresses.
Against a background of anarchy, the father holds the camera, the law of the eye, attentive to the dance of the existing, watching over the sleep of the just.
In the shambles of life, paths of freedom are found: the ethics of permanent displacement.
In the train, in the restaurant, in the kitchen, we look at each other directly, we smile, we confirm.
Life is beautiful, it is a theater of shadows and precarious lights, a persistent miracle.
History exists, but it is hardly a decor, that crosses as an interstellar module a family embarked on the affection and the noise always new.
Fabien Ribery
More information on: https://www.filigranes.com/livre/trop-nest-meme-pas-assez/
Information
Filigranes Éditions
https://www.filigranes.com/livre/trop-nest-meme-pas-assez/
November 09, 2019 to January 09, 2020