Hervé Guibert, Zen Cat and Mouse
Hervé Guibert is still on my mind. Me and him cohabit in silence, to the pace of our mutual wistfulness and the stealthy days when we play cat and mouse together. I am the mouse, he is the cat. A Sôseki-like cat, heat-sensitive, blessed with an eye for detail and the ritual sense of space that is so vital to day-blind beings.
Another thing we have in common – photography, which turned Hervé Guibert into an analogue reporter with the help of Yvonne Baby (former head of the culture department at Le Monde), then into a photographer with a Rollei 35, a present from his father. Writing about photography gave him a pedigree ; he tackled Ilse Bing and André Kertész, Duane Michals and Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Gilles Ehrmann and Édouard Boubat… He was, at the time, almost the only one to take over picture places and books, which he recounted with extremely precise words, never getting carried away by the odd fashionable topic.
