From January 18 to March 3, 2018, Galerie Argentic in Paris presents a selection of fifty photographs by Jean-Claude Gautrand, French photography’s privileged witness. This selection covers over 60 years of work and brings together his most beautiful series, including Les Forteresses du dérisoire, Oradour-sur-Glane, and Natzwiller Struthof featured here.
The following images stem from the need to identify elements of recent history. This trilogy of photographs about the memory of World War II is as much a raw record of certain events as a lesson to be drawn by each of us. There is no need for grand political speeches; Gautrand’s images speak for themselves. Aesthetically, the photographer adapts Eugene Smith’s claim that formal perfection of a message is what allows for the greatest efficiency. Aesthetic pleasure and commitment to a cause are thus indisputably intertwined in what one may consider as a warning, such as the one formulated by the American philosopher of Spanish origin, George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Les Forteresses du dérisoire (1973/1976)
Forty years after the war, the photographer captures bunkers — relics of the Atlantic Wall — in the process of decay. These concrete monuments disintegrate in every possible way: fractured, shattered, buried, swallowed up by ruthless forces of nature, driving home the theory of Vanitas. But herein lies the true originality of Gautrand’s oeuvre: he photographs these modern megaliths, replete with architectural beauty and cultural references, as works of art. By divesting them of their function, Gautrand turns them into veritable installations, true sculptures, even while bringing to the fore the tragedy they embody. As the artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud wrote, “These photographs are not just beautiful, they are charged. They offer a quiet, emotion-filled stroll, where no living being appears, and the weight of silence is unforgiving.”
Oradour-sur-Glane (1995)
The same unforgiving silence can be found in Oradour-sur-Glane, a glacial record of the brutal destruction in June 1944 of a peaceful village by barbarity adhering to a nauseating ideology. Left intact, petrified and fossilized, the town, once alive with sounds and full of motion, is now mute and immobile, traversed by memory which sustains meditation as humanist as it is political. Gautrand’s images refrain from any aesthetic dramatization, letting the stark contours of the ruins and the shadows under the bright sun speak for themselves … amid overwhelming silence.
Natzweiler-Struthof (1996)
Another record, this time of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, a concentrationary universe in which every rock, every stretch of barbed wire has become a hypnotic object that never ceases to exude horror in a world of haze and deadly ideologies which, sadly, continue to rise up from their ashes. This triptych, according to Michèle Moutashar, former director of the Musée Réattu in Arles, describes “the same tragic and historical context, the context of war, of inhumanity, the same desire of the artist to remember and to make these voices heard once again, be it only by pointing to silence.”
Jean-Claude Gautrand, Itinéraire d’un photographe
January 18 to March 3, 2018
Galerie Argentic
43 Rue Daubenton
75005 Paris
France
