Transplants games are about eyes and vision, or rather about vision loss and its effects on those close to the visually impaired. This work is based on a personal experience, the visual impairment of my father. It nourished my desire and my need for images and photographs.
This new research unfolded in two stages. In the first I discovered and matched the field of vision of my father and the profound impact of this handicap on my perception of the world and on my image. He only saw me as a shadow, and that shadow was the image I had of myself. At night, its sharpness was almost nil and, in the day, it was limited to global shapes, without details. Strangely, until 2014, I passionately loved blurred photographs, out of focus without knowing why.
Then, a second part followed, drawing on these latest discoveries. The process of which I will give On an old photo ID, I roughly cut out his glasses. Under the gaping holes, as a joke, I placed the eyes of other people. Mine, those of a cousin or of anonymous persons. I no longer recognized my father in the course of the manipulations. So I realized that, a long time after his death, I had offered him a miracle operation by grafting the eyes of a child, a woman or those of a young man. Seeing eyes .
Ghost vision
Initially, I envisioned a series of self-portraits. It was just an impulse, the idea of a work on aging that is inevitable. But, faced with the first printed proofs, new, very different perspectives appeared to me
An older photograph, which I named “The Ghost”, came to mind. It represented my shadow. No doubt the memory of a past when my image was still evanescent, almost unreal. This shadow, this ghost, I realized then, probably corresponded to what my father – whose sight was weak – saw of the world. An accident in his childhood, and then, a hazy vision, blurred, darkening more and more with age.
His visual disturbances, his low vision founded, I believe, my desire to become a photographer and induced writing. It is ultimately a kind of inner and partial image that is shown here.
Truncated representation, pierced with holes and words.
This work was a revelation, that of the look of my father lurking in my shadow. Most recently, I learned that my chance discovery, related to this series, could be likened to a process with a learned name, serendipity *.
* Serendipity: Ability, art of making a discovery, scientific in particular, by chance; the discovery thus made (Larousse)
