It’s a journey to a place that is both far away and very near, perhaps a mental escapade? Like in a dream. I have come back from this journey with a few images for you to look
at and some collected objects, like the small stones one picks up by the side of the road, like the hazelnuts from the tree beneath which one rested with the loved one.
Here they are, proving that I did leave after all.
But there is nothing more uncertain than the reality of things. Right here, close to you, life is so fragile it could tear like a veil. Where would we go then? Perhaps there, looking for that which was the most precious but that we have lost, our feelings, so true,
for the beauty of things. These things are precisely not exactly where we think they are. Perhaps this elsewhere is our past buried deep down like so many memories in the history of our heart. We will know how to find them provided we know where to look for them.
And whatever we may think or say, there is a long journey ahead for all of us, leading us to uncertain shores.
We all live under influence, the result of a path, an history, a primordial memory. For my part, there are still Max Erns, René Magritte, Sam Haskin, Jay Maisel, Roman Cieslewicz, Hernst Haas, Folon….
Those are only images, more precisely photographic images as it is what I am requested to provide. Besides, does the method of producing those images matter?
But that question intrigues . Does one always has to respond to it?
Everything starts with an emotion, sometimes such a fleeting one that it mixes with memories and dreams from which is born the lack of certitude about the certainty of things seen.
When was it and where exactly that leaf picked up in the gutter, so pretty, so lonely, so lost?
Who cares since, in the reflexion of the automnal sun, its solitude touched me.
Giving it back an ephemeral flights was then the least of the things….
Jean-Marie Chournoz often tells : photography is only a tool and the pen does not make the writer. With his 88 years of experience, he is there every day to remind me that research is essential.
So everything starts with a quest of images. They can be argentines or numerics, it does not matter much. Assembled from a long time, often from the hazard of a look, like an happy encounter, they impose themselves… from one gathering to the other, an horizon organizes itself, horizon of an unlikely landscape but a real one, since time, hazard and the « betrayal of images » according to Magritte, perpetually play with our perception of things.
Incertains rivages
Quelques images de Philippe Dubois
Brasserie Le Select
From September 9 to 23
99 Boulevard du Montparnasse
75006 Paris
