Bridging the past and the future, reality and fiction, photography finds in this double coming and going a source of strength as well as ambivalence, which also accounts for its unique status.
Some images seem strangely familiar. A color, a gesture, or the way the light strikes an object: that’s all that’s needed to create an unexpected flash of recognition. Photography is without a doubt a privileged witness of our connections to the people we love and to the places where we belong. A veritable developer of our moods, photography traces, day after day, a topology of our memory. Its great power resides in its ability to tease out the poetry of a detail caught in the surrounding chaos. While the link between memory and the photographic image requires no further proof, it is worth noting that the ambivalent power of photography is due more to its poetic charge and the irrefutable character of its trace than to its capacity to resuscitate the past.
Not long ago, I experienced a feeling of slight unease before Linda Brownlee’s latest series. The images of the British photographer radiated tranquil beauty that defies any chronology. I Zii explores the everyday life of a family in a Sicilian village of a few thousand inhabitants, not far from Palermo. Spontaneous portraits appear next to scenes captured in mid-action. Each moment is charged with density and tangible depth, which anchor the real. With tender curiosity, Linda Brownlee records details visible only to her. One can sense in her work a kind of openness onto what exists deep within each of us, a willingness to engage with the infinite singularity of beings and things. Free of voyeurism, her eye seeks out the little rituals, which punctuate our existence, and fleeting moments of happiness: a birthday dinner, a calm summer afternoon. In one picture, two girls seen from behind are washing their hair in the rain. The frame is large enough to include a corner of the house and the rain-soaked landscape.
The fields disappear in autumn fog, while paths strewn with over-ripe fruit resemble the vestiges of our childhood dreams. Seasons pass, time folds onto itself… More than an instrument of memory, photography is its substitute. “[It gives] the texture and the essence of things,” writes Susan Sontag. By reminding us of our powerlessness in the face of passing time, photography painfully models our identity and forces us to rethink our relationship to the world. The past and the present cohabit and transform each other depending on our fears and anxieties. Marcel Proust took the analogy further, comparing memory to an inner darkroom, in which are stored latent impressions, too painful to confront directly but preserved intact by the protective vacuum of oblivion.
I have long kept, pinned to the wall over my bed, a reproduction of a Polaroid taken by the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky while scouting for location for his film Nostalghia. The photograph shows a bouquet of flowers set on a table, the remains of a meal, and three pieces of fruit on a plate. Warm light filters through the window in the background, falling across the white tablecloth and setting the yellow dahlias aflame. This deceptively plain image fully expresses the profound complexity of the connections which preside over the creation of memories. It opens up a chink in the future, and we plunge toward infinity rather than holding on to nostalgia for an inaccessible past. For Andrei Tarkovsky, an artistic image “does not signify life or symbolize it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.”
Every work of art eludes its own creator in order to submit to the gaze of the viewer. And it is in this very movement that it finds its raison d’être. The work of art addresses something indefinable that lies dormant within us. Historically, artists have done nothing but explore this mystery. How does one express the inexpressible? How does one make audible the little secret melody? We could evoke the aerial bodies suspended between heaven and earth in Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s photos; the details extracted from daily life by Rinko Kawauchi vibrating with intensity; or the elegant gentleness of Saul Leiter’s early pictures, long before color and fame: the images of his father, his friends, his lovers. Who better than Saul Leiter to capture the grace of a passing moment, the shimmer of life at its most intimate? Leiter is a photographer of a world hovering at the edge of reality; his is a relentless search for traces of lives past or yet to come. “When you don’t know why the photographer took a photograph, you don’t know why you look at it, and then suddenly you discover something, you start to see. I love this sense of confusion,” he declared.
As the psychiatrist and researcher Serge Tisseron notes, if, from the start, photography has offered a mixed reality, it is because it blends reality and fiction in a way that makes it impossible to tell them apart. Photography is constructed in a constant give-and-take between an objective reality and this other form of reality made up of the photographer’s inner visions. Memory works in a similar way. “[Memory] continuously transforms the matter of our remembrance: it stretches it or condenses it, depending on the case, picking up a detail, enlarging it, modifying it, and so on, ad infinitum.”
As French photographer Camille Bonnefoi aptly puts it, “photography is white, or neutral, writing which, with every moment, refashions our memory. It seems capable of filling in the gaps, of generating the missing memories.” Photography creates a sort of universal family album of which we all possess a tiny fragment; and each image that makes up the whole becomes forever a part of our lives, of our personal experience. This is also the story of a lost identity, the identity of a childhood we think we know because we experienced it. The terrible thing is that others remember it better than we do and possess a part of us that necessarily eludes us. “We are strangers to ourselves, and if we have any idea who we are, it’s only because we live in the eye of the other.”
Cathy Rémy
Cathy Rémy has been a journalist at Le Monde since 2008, where she features the work of young photographers and emerging visual artists. Since 2011, she has contributed to M Le Monde, Camera, and Aperture.
