Denis Darzacq, Interview
Act, his new exhibition at the Laurence Miller Gallery, deals with the mentally and physically disabled. Denis Darzacq, looking good and sporting fashionable sneakers, sat in the patio of an East Village Mexican restaurant and spoke to us about the liberation of disabled bodies and his own mind.
Since La Chute, your star has continued to rise. How do you look back on these past few years?
Denis Darzacq: It’s surprising. You feel like you take the same pictures over and over. And then suddenly there’s a series or a single image that sums them all up. For me, there’s always a body, and the placement of the body in the frame speaks to us of the world today, through the subject of minorities. With La Chute, Christian Caujolle encouraged me to present the series to the World Press. I told him that my photographs were staged and didn’t qualify as documentary photographs, which are real. After winning the Art and Entertainment prize, I was suddenly overwhelmed with opportunities to work and exhibit. Christian Caujolle has insisted for years that we shouldn’t categorize photography. For the first time, staged photographs were more effective than media reports at communicating the situation in the French suburbs. Things had come full circle.
What is the story behind Act, your new project that features the mentally and physically disabled?
DD: In The Fall and Hyper, I worked with people in the prime of their lives, people with extraordinary physical abilities. Like I was saying, we’re always take the same pictures. I decided to again use bodies, only this time bodies that have never really found their place in society, bodies ailing physically and psychologically. Democratic societies have addressed almost every type of minority, be it ethnic or sexual. Addressing physical and mental minorities is also a part of our humanity, and artists, at the heart of social issues, only rarely address them. In general, when you see a photograph of a disabled person, it’s for a charity and the caption is something like ‘Take pity on us, help us!’ With Act my photographs are on display at one of the largest New York galleries. You can buy them, sell them, give them life. It exists, they exist, their image exists.
Can you tell us more about the people in the pictures?
DD: They are bodies that are positioned within the frame, the frame being society. I got in touch with a theatre group called Mind the Gap, from Bradford, England, and then visited institutions for the disabled in Brest, France, and a private clinic in Miami. Half of them are disabled professionals. The idea was to show as few accessories as possible, like an electric wheelchair, to prevent them from upstaging the person.
What, for you, is a disabled person?
DD: We are all disabled to some degree. There’s no single definition, that’s the principle of minority. You might be taller than me, I might be heavier; I might be older, and you might be younger, but I’ll have more experience. The problem is, that’s life. Of course, some disabilities are more challenging than others.
What do you find touching about a disabled person?
DD: It’s another humanity. Some people have said to me: ‘How dare you photograph disabled people.’ And I said: ‘How dare you not photograph them’.
This series features more backgrounds and contexts than your other series. Why the change?
DD: In my previous work, the uniformity of the background was sometimes a little excessive. Today I’m liberated, the form has become less important. What makes each photo a part of the series is the ability of each subject to overcome their disabilities and take their place in the frame. I rejected several photographs that were too passive. In Miami, I took a picture of a boy who didn’t know how to speak with his body. However, a month later, he made the strong gesture of wearing a T-shirt that read: ‘I reject your reality and I substitute my own’.
This time your subjects speak, and we can observe their faces, their emotions…
DD Hyper was absolute metaphor. It was between being and having, and finding one’s place in a purely mercantile society. Acts bears witness. These are real people with real names, they aren’t metaphors, even if the photographs are.
Would it be accurate to label this project a kind of social rehabilitation program?
DD: My photographs don’t provide answers, only questions.
Was it difficult at times?
DD: The first time I went to the institution in Brest, I had to ask myself whether or not I’d be able to bear the extraordinary physical difference. Would I be strong enough not to look away, the way we all do? Once you can get past that, you meet the people in front of you, men and women.
Do you feel a little like you’re surfing on the wave of your success by adapting this subject to your style of photography?
DD: Would you ask a choreographer if he was tired of making people dance? Would you ask Jacques Demy if he was tired of making films in the style of Ingmar Bergman? You can’t really say that these people spend their time jumping through the air, because they can’t.
Between the portraits, different frames and attitudes, this series stands out from your previous ones through its diversity.
DD: Right, these pictures are more free. The professionals in Hyper perform their movement then go back home. In Act, each photo is a manifesto. These people will always be in this state.
Do you know if your photographs have already changed the way viewers see the people in them?
DD: I’m no savior. This is a general movement in the same vein as the French film Intouchables. Again, we’re not here to pity these people.
Film or digital?
DD: On Friday I was with Kathy Ryan from the New York Times magazine. She didn’t think for a second to ask a question like that. We’re overwhelmed by gamma curves, RAW, JPEG—I don’t understand it and I don’t give a damn. The only thing that conversation does is fill the void of creation anxiety.
You always shoot your subjects from a distance. What lens do you prefer?
DD: 50mm. I don’t like the distortion. It puts too much emphasis on the scene, and I like a low profile.
Do you still work with newspapers?
DD: Yes, sometimes.
What types of jobs?
DD: There aren’t very many. (Laughter) For newspapers, photography has become the fifth wheel. When somebody joins the photo department, it’s their first job, they’re in their twenties, they don’t know anything, before that they were working in a cafeteria.
Are there things you don’t like in photography?
DD: Millions. Starting with Photoshop and its bad ideas. And when something is coarse, I don’t like that.
What would you tell a young photographer who came to you for advice?
DD: I guess that means I’m not young anymore… My advice would be, keep working, discover new things, wherever you are. There’s no excuse to be sitting there in your apartment.
Can you tell us something about your next project?
DD: No. (Laughter)
Interview by Jonas Cuénin.
Denis Darzacq, Act – Meditations on the Disabled Body
Until June 15, 2012, at the Laurence Miller gallery
20 W 57th St, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10019
(212) 397-3930
