Editions Delpire is publishing an amazing book dedicated to the career of the famous editor Robert Delpire and to his relationships with his contributors. We are presenting a selection of texts he wrote.
That work, I knew it, I saw the very first photos speaking of the beauty of discovery, the awe before the magic of the process. Everything is possible, or almost. I saw Ingrid, Suzanne, endlessly waiting for a man, waiting for a letter, or the end of the day. I saw the tulips spring from the floor, I saw the woman open like a butterfly, the woman sewn like a dress, the dress tremble like a woman. I saw the child holding hands with a monkey and offering tea to the cat.
Yes, that work, I saw it made. I saw naivety evolve into expertise, asserting itself, diversifying, maturing without ever driving away concern. It is the privilege of a shared daily routine, to be at the peak of excitement, to be at the heart of fear, to see how we give a face to pipe dreams and how desperate the search for beauty is.
Yes, a work, a mixture of intuition, rigor, and persistence. A vagabond spirit, an imagination without rest and restrain. Not a rejection, but a total inability to compromise.
A talent that we recognize everywhere in the world. A fixed or moving image, same attention to framing and light, to sequence and music, same way of being cautious of gentleness, as if Fauré had written his Ballade for her.
A career, without equivocation nor pretense. But upon recognition, at the moment of diplomas, medals, and trophies of all sorts, she suddenly realizes that she does not need to remake the world, either under contract or for herself, that she can look at her garden in the snow, that she can open the door of the studio and see without inventing. She dreams of trees as she dreamed of men, she takes paths that only lead to her, she clings to the stars in a sky of rain, and the fields she roams welcome a strange bestiary. Because she quickly understands that she cannot show what she sees, that she can recount what she could see, that she can be more comfortable with reality, as she always did.
Thus born were these unexpected images. She, who so often played on the evanescence of forms and the uncertainty of lines, on the vacillation of weather and light, she takes pleasure in exaggerating, in marking contours, in saturating colors.
But, in her photographs, there will always be a sensitivity that only she has. There will be neither sappiness nor complacency in the way she looks at women. And she will always be dazzled by a bird appearing, from the depths of seas and until the end of time, looking at her blue eye and showing her its feathers.
Robert Delpire
Robert Delpire is an editor, artistic director, exhibition curator, and founder of Éditions Delpire. He lives and works in Paris.
C’est de voir qu’il s’agit…
Published by Êditions Delpire
35€
