I’m feeling a bit lost this week, so if you can’t be bothered, go ahead and turn the page.
A few minutes ago, they announced on the radio that Brigitte Bardot thinks Marine Le Pen, the right-wing candidate in the upcoming French presidential elections, fantastic, and plans to vote for her. My thanks to Plato for having distinguished between soma and psyche. These two entities in Bardot are forever joined, like Lobachevsky’s parallels, filthy, unbearable, putrid, garbage…
I remember seeing a picture of Bardot sitting in the stands at a bullfight. And another in a hospital room, at the bedside of the head of the far-right terrorist group OAS.
But that’s not all! In the pages of Le Monde Argent (the financial version of the French newspaper—you can’t make this stuff up) we read that after four years of recession, safe investments are prohibitively expensive, that one should give priority to stakes in large companies, and that real assets are the best protection against inflation…This concerns you, do you understand?
More good news: according to Le Monde Sciences and Techno, the study of the trajectory of a soccer ball has found an application in fire hose technology…
What does this have to do with photography? For me it’s obvious. Look at the April 14 photo by Lionel Charrier, which inspired Didier Péron to write an excellent column. It’s political, it’s ideological, and it’s great: “The image in its silence calls for help—not in the direction of sleep, but of revolt. Because the things we do not want to see shake us from the comfort of our moral desert.”
Photography is a political commitment, a practice as risky as it is lucid.
Yours Truly, have a good week.
Michel Philippot
