Les Douches la Galerie presents the photographic work of Denis Roche with the exhibition Dans les plis du temps (In the folds of time), which will be presented from September 12 to October 25, 2025. Roche was a photographer who captured both dramatic moments and intimate scenes. Here is Guillaume Geneste‘s text introducing him.
“There is nothing more silent than a photograph, there is no other art that can be as silent. By wanting to stop time, even if only for a fraction of a second, photography emits silence.” Denis Roche In photography, much more than in any other artistic practice, every act is a matter of choice. Over time, when Denis Roche had to revisit his contact sheets to select his photographs, find a place or a date to caption, it was with reluctance and anxiety that he delved into his archives, for he said: “Each time I feel like I’m stirring death.” I heard him say these words, but I also, and above all, had the chance to listen to him speak in front of the last prints that I submitted to him for the exhibition organized in November 2015 by Gilles Mora, at the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier. We were at his home at La Fabrique, he was reviewing the prints one by one, from box to box, when after a long silence, Denis Roche said in a suspended moment: “What’s wonderful about photography is everything that’s around it.” This was a few months before he passed away on September 2, 2015, exactly ten years ago. Since then, this phrase has never left me, and it was with it in mind that we selected all the photographs that make up this exhibition at Les Douches la Galerie, prints chosen in the folds of time, from the boxes where Denis Roche stored them. Boxes which, along with those containing his negatives, joined the Collections of the Nicéphore-Niépce Museum in 2022. This selection of forty photographs was made under the watchful eye of his wife Françoise Peyrot, who knows better than anyone what the words everything around embodies here. But after the death of an artist, let’s not be fooled, it’s always another story that is written. The more I look at Denis Roche’s photographs, the more I find myself face to face with life, this life that he knew how to appreciate intensely, describing as immense and intense jubilation the pleasures he felt when he wrote, photographed or even edited. Looking at Denis Roche’s photographs is for me like looking at those of Bernard Plossu or Robert Frank; because all, I mean all of his photographs give me a furious desire to live and to photograph. To discover, as some of you will do here, or to rediscover the work of Denis Roche, is to approach life fully, to tame death with prudence, to be confronted with the passing of time and, at the same time, to reflect through the writings he left us on what happens when the storm carries the photographer away in a split second. The man knew more than anyone else about photography and his great strength as an intellectual, writer and photographer was to have been able to speak about it from the inside, offering us a unique counterpoint in the history of photography to the view of certain theorists who were certainly believers, but not practitioners. To love Denis Roche’s photographs is to look at the beauty of a body to the point of losing all sense of space, but it is also to take the time to stop for a moment in front of a landscape that imposes silence on you. It is always and again to be confronted with the loss of the moment which, immediately after being captured, already belongs to the past, but on the sole condition of living, of living a life filled with love and freedom. To appreciate Denis Roche’s work is to understand that it is as much formal as it is autobiographical, as intimate as it is universal in the themes it addresses where light is neither more nor less than the metaphor of time and vice versa, as he so loved to say. Denis Roche’s photography tells us forcefully “I was there”, the “it was ok” remaining, for its part, of an obvious banality.
Guillaume Geneste
Exhibition curator Printer of Denis Roche’s photographs since 1991
To accompany this exhibition, “Dans les plis du temps” a book is being published as a tribute in the collection Denis Roche founded, “Fictions et Cie” at Seuil.
Denis Roche : Dans les plis du temps
September 12 – October 25, 2025
Les Douches la Galerie
5 rue Legouvé
75010 Paris
+33 1 78 94 03 00
www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com
instagram @lesdoucheslagalerie
