“Just as it is illusory to say that you can capture reality, it is a mistake to think that you take a photograph. It is given to us. You can take it when you decide to, but you are not always ready to receive. Taking photographs is an experiment on the inner gaze.”
For Pierre de Fenoÿl photography was the art of receiving, unlike the arts of extraction that are painting and literature. To achieve this state of reception, he practiced intensively the act of walking, asserting that it was “the only photography school”.
In 1984, the Délégation Interministérielle à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Attractivité Régionale (DATAR) launched a photographic mission inspired by the heliographic mission of 1851 to establish an inventory of the French landscape, and commissioned Pierre de Fenoÿl with Gabriele Basilico, Sophie Ristelhueber and Christian Milovanoff. While taking pictures for the project, he developed a desire to settle in the Tarn. It was here in this region that he would take most of his pictures.
Pierre de Fenoÿl walked there for entire days, fascinated and enchanted by the foliage, the trees, the wind, the undulating terrain and the skies. “Sometimes, on good days, the clouds position themselves exactly where you want them. That is obviously a moment of joy. Who has not dreamed of playing with the clouds,” he wrote. In his landscapes, there is no trace of people or of modern industry, although the presence of people is palpable
In the crops, monuments, gardens, cemeteries and religious buildings. Pierre de Fenoÿl sought there the spirit of the place, traces of history, as well as the furtive appearance of an Eden or a garden of delights over which there sometimes hovers, despite the gentleness, a tormented shadow. Helped by his wife, who printed his photographs, he used the same style of dark print as he did for his Parisian and Egyptian landscapes, creating a disruption of time that makes it difficult to know one is witnessing the end or the beginning of the world.
Pierre de Fenoÿl’s principal obsession was time. “In this journey that is more initiatory than artistic, the important thing is to look at time passing, not to spend one’s time looking. In this quest through the real, my memory is my style. Memory is an image, memory is the image of time.” “I am neither a surveyor, nor a visionary,” he claimed in an allusion to Cartier-Bresson. “I am, I want to be, a chronophotographer in search of time present.”
At the beginning of his career, the spiritual dimension was barely visible, but it would become more explicit. “My progression through the world of photography makes me incline firmly towards a religious, almost mystical conception of photography,” he wrote in 1983. This existential search for presence in the world is particularly evident in the photographs he took of his shadow in the landscapes he passed through, or in his strange pictures of the Châteliers estate in Anjou, which seemed to be inhabited by spirits and memories. Furthermore, it is significant that Pierre de Fenoÿl’s first appearance in an institutional exhibition took place in the “Photographic Self-Portraits” exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1981. Pierre de Fenoÿl subsequently produced numerous self-portraits, always in the form of shadows cast on the landscape he was photographing.
The originality of his pictures led him to appear in most of the exhibitions devoted to the French school of the 1980s. This school, centred on black and white and on introspection or autobiography, included photographers such as Arnaud Claass, Magdi Senadji, Bernard Plossu, Daniel Boudinet, Keiichi Tahara, Jun Shiraoka, Christian Milovanoff, Holger Trulzsch and Denis Roche.
On 4 September 1987, without any warning, Pierre de Fenoÿl collapsed suddenly, struck down by a heart attack. He left behind him a short but dense body of work, to which this exhibition pays tribute.
These rooms present a group of 63 modern and vintage prints, original documents, an extract from the radio programme La nuit sur un plateau. Magazine de la photo and a film by Didier Beleskiewicz (director), Pierre de Fenoÿl. Paysages de campagne, 1985.
EXHIBITION
Pierre de Fenoÿl (1945-1987). An imaginary geography
From June 20th to October 31st, 2015
Jeu de Paume – Château de Tours
25 avenue André Malraux
37000 Tours
France
+33 (0)2 47 21 61 95
Tuesday – Sunday 2pm – 6pm
Free Entrance
http://www.jeudepaume.org
UPCOMING
Pierre de Fenoÿl Paysages conjugués
From September 5 to December 31st, 2015
Galerie Le Réverbère
38 Rue Burdeau
69001 Lyon
France
Tél. : +33 (0)4 72 00 06 72
http://www.galerielereverbere.com
BOOK
« Pierre de Fenoÿl. An imaginary geography »
Texts by Virginie Chardin, Jacques Damez, Peter Galassi.
Éditions Jeu de Paume / Xavier Barral.
240 pages 24 x 28 cm
144 photographs
Price : 50 euros
ISBN : 9782365110730
http://exb.fr
