Editor, photographer, theorist but above all poet, Denis Roche, died on Wednesday, September, 2nd in Paris at the age of 77. He created the collection Fiction & Cie and directed it at Editions Du Seuil for thirty years. In 1980, he founded « Les Cahiers de la Photographie » with Gilles Mora and Bernard Plossu, a magazine whose purpose was to gather all written works that lead to reflections on Photography. The magazine reached its pinnacle with the organization of two conferences at the Sorbonne, Paris in 1982 and 1985.Editor, photographer, theorist but above all poet,. In 1987, Denis Roche was awarded the Photography grand prize of the city of Paris. His monograph « Les Preuves du Temps » specially edited [Editions du Seuil/Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris/ Paris 2001] for the exhibition dedicated to the photographer by the MEP, gathers all his photographic work.
For thirty years, he took a lot of pictures : travel,leisure and wandering pictures, . Time is at the center of his work. His fascination for the present moment takes its roots in the deep desire to stop time, and to defer or even escape death. “Every picture, as you take it, is beside time. Of course! From the ‘it was alright behavior’ which brought little worry, to the ‘nothing to say behavior’ even present at the very core of the capture of an expression, a smile, a shape, or a light, is, in the end, what merely troubled Barthes.”
These black and white pictures : self-portraits taken with a self timer, either alone or with his wife Françoise, nudes, landscapes, still life pictures mostly taken on vacation, are imbued with poetry. They are always tagged with locations, dates, and factual captions to perceive the tests of time. He experimented the possibility to write an autobiography using images and their captions. The diarist, Denis Roche, often portrayed himself taking pictures of himself, to show the overlaying of these two self-representing practices. His photographic self-portraits might correspond to the creational desire to stage writing, or at least to a constant questioning between literature and photography.
Irène Attinger
