I had never met Daniel Boudinet, but wrote a few lines about him in Libération, shortly after his untimely death, at 45, on August 12, 1990. Marie-Claude Beaud, then Director of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, had come to the newspaper. We were in a small room, near the cultural department, and I had religiously written down all information she shared with me. I was completely inept at photography. Marie-Claude Beaud understood my distress, and enveloped me in her enthusiasm, as if she had the gift of projecting fragments of the past into the present, those who could have lived with Daniel Boudinet, in Bomarzo or in a far away neighborhood of London or Rome, wreathed in a blue so green, close to darkness.
“Daniel was the king of color” she had said, adding that he worked “like a painter, not like a photographer. Always head-on, there was no hierarchy to his subjects. He was determined, like many artists, to be perfect. Limits empassioned him, frontiers, but he was also capable of giving his architectural views – for example, the Panthéon – an almost natural light”.
When Marie-Claude Beaud left, I had the feeling that I had just devoured an apple pie. Had I been dreaming? Regardless, this delicious imaginary snack stayed with me, as did Daniel Boudinet, the strange cowlick on his forehead, his memory.
He reappeared, as if unintentionally, when, with Françoise Morin, we were trying to imagine a photographer or a curious soul to share this unusual gallery space. On one side, my photos, on the other, who?
And why not Daniel Boudinet? Immediate enthusiasm: that’s who it will be, said Françoise. And here we are, together, Daniel Boudinet, the Parisian of Chamonix whose Polaroid opens Roland Barthes’ picture novel, La Chambre Claire, and me, in my new world, where everything belongs to me, even the blue sky. With Daniel Boudinet, we at least share a yearning for color.
Brigitte Ollier
La couleur annoncée
Brigitte Ollier et Daniel Boudinet
Les Douches, la Galerie
5, rue Legouvé
75 010 Paris
Tel : 01 46 07 10 84
Wednesday-Friday: 1-7pm
Saturday: 2-6pm
