Having discovered one day that his son suddenly went from being a child to a being young adult, the photographer Steeve Iuncker became interested in this moment of “transition” and “passage.” He spent several years conducting research into the passage from childhood to adulthood and questioning the absence of clearly identified rites in our secular societies. His images capture the acting of adolescents that look a lot like unconscious rites.
Prises de risques, quête d’oubli comme une forme de mort et renaissance, flirt avec les limites, actes transformateurs : le photographe tisse un paysage visuel subtil de la mue, et nous renvoie à nos propres rituels intimes. Il cartographie un territoire incertain, fait de flottements autant que de saignements, et interroge, sur un mode très personnel, une étape de la vie avec tout ce qu’elle comporte de risqué et de douloureux, dans un monde qui offre peu de points de repères. Saut en parachute, maternité précoce, fêtes alcoolisées, temps de latence et d’ennui, scarifications et tatouages, violence larvée ou canalisée dans le sport, les aspects abordés par le photographe ne cherchent pas à donner une définition universelle et univoque des rites de passage à l’adolescence. Il s’agit plutôt d’esquisser un portrait intime et nuancé d’une jeunesse en quête de soi.
Risk-taking, oblivion seeking as a form of death and rebirth, boundaries testing transformative acts performing: the photographer paints a subtle visual landscape of coming of age, and takes us back to our own private rituals. He maps an uncertain territory composed of indecisions and wounds, and in a very personal way questions a stage of life and everything that’s risky and painful about it, in a world that offers few points of reference. Skydiving, early pregnancies, binge drinking, latency times and boredom, tattooing and scarring, violence smoldering or channeled into sports—the issues addressed by the photographer do not aim to offer a universal or univocal definition of adolescent rites of passage. Rather, this is about drawing an intimate, nuanced portrait of youth trying to find itself.
Steeve Iuncker works in large 4×5 inch film format, placing the subject at the “right” distance, that is, sincere and non-intrusive. His approach, both intimate and documentary, is transformed at the moment of developing thanks to an analog charcoal printing process, called Fresson quadrichromy. The resulting pictorial feel lends this contemporary body of work a timeless materiality and aesthetics. Adolescence is a rift. “My work aims at examining this fragile journey which is hesitant, defiant, and courts danger in the act of self-creation,” he explains. “Rites of passage symbolically probe death in order to know whether life is worth living. While adolescence is no longer defined by age, whose temporal boundaries have disappeared, perhaps it can be identified through conduct, either collective or individual? Being born, becoming adult, and dying.”
Irène Attinger
Irène Attinger is head of the library and bookstore at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.
Steeve Iuncker, Se mettre au monde
Published by Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne / Le bec en l’air
€38
