Éditions Delpire just published a wonderful book dedicated to the career of the famous editor Robert Delpire and to his relationships with authors. We are presenting a selection of texts written by the publisher himself in which he shares a few anecdotes and secrets.
From the dark depths of consciousness emerges a photograph. Once time has been fixed, a routine meticulous operation, both simple and complexe leads a fleeting moment to the revelation of a reality. This is the adolescence of the image. Fixed, judged, preserved, conserved, multiplied, exhibited, reproduced, it reaches maturity. It’s a file in the archive of a single person’s memory. It’s a minuscule fragment of the mirror of the society. It’s a realization or a dream, a report or an indictment; it can sing of love or of the agony of time; it can conceal or show; it is clear to the point of hypocrisy, blurry to the point of truth. It is the queen image; it is dying. We have known it all along. We have experienced its decay, watched it wear down. Irritated by its omnipresence, tired of its repetitions, we came to treat images with only a passing interest. Thousands of photos, featured day after day as if they were all equivalent, have ushered a society with no differences. A society of indifference.
When the body of a celebrity is worth the price of capital punishment (it is sold and bought for the same amount), what does it mean to be a photographer? What does it mean to see an image? The black covered the grey. The fixed image was dying. However, it was at the very moment when the illustrated press was ground to pulp and history became a story for television, that the unique document, the rare, heavy, charged, and haunted image, that had always been called “Photography,” entered, with the same rush, into the Museum and the Stock Market.
To reflect on the image has become today an absolute urgency. Godard is doing it. He is practically the only one. No one—and for a reason—wants to either watch or listen to the two admirable films, Ici et ailleurs and Photo et Cie. What do we know about the FSA photographers in America who weren’t traveling to the end of the world to find poverty and haggle it? What do we know about August Sander who with thousands of plates, recorded the life of the three Germany: that of the Kaiser, Weimar, and under the Führer? Next to nothing.
What we ask for today, is the right to review. But to exercise this right, we all need to learn anew how to see.
Robert Delpire
Robert Delpire is an editor, artistic director, exhibition curator, and founder of the eponymous publishing house. He lives and works in Paris.
C’est de voir qu’il s’agit…
Published by Editions Delpire
€35
