The fourth edition of the PORTRAIT(S) festival of Vichy opens its doors . Until September 4th Vichy is an outpost of today’s photography for a season and is presenting to the public some exhibitions centered exclusively around the art of the portrait. This new edition is showing nine artists whose exhibitions are taking place simultaneously in the city centre and around it , in the open air. L’Oeil de la Photographie brings you the work of one photographer from the programme every day. Today, focus on « The Damn Came, But no Day » by Jean-Christian Bourcart.
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs, which were taken in the United States during the Great Depression, are part of the nation’s heritage. The most famous of these photographers – Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, et al. – travelled around the country from 1935 to 1943 with the mission of documenting the devastating effects of the economic crash. From this project emerged iconic images that seventy years later continue to fascinate photographers. Jean-Christian Bourcart is one of them, but he does it in his own way. Turning his back on the cult photographs, he decided instead to get hold of shots that had been rejected at the time by Roy Stryker, the head of the FSA photographic project. These pictures are easily recognizable: Stryker punched holes in negatives he did not think good enough to be used. What criteria did he use to determine which image to punch holes in and which not? That is hard to tell, because many of the rejected images seem every bit as striking as those that were accepted. What struck Jean-Christian Bourcart, however, is that Roy Stryker’s punch marks were not always haphazard: very often he made them on the face, the throat, the heart or the crotch of the subject, leaving the marks of crude, unexplainable violence on the images. It is as if to the distress of these men, women and children, already crushed by the Great Depression, he had added the seal of indignity, the sanction of a murderous, amputating eye that wiped them from the record.
Fascinated by this mutilated corpus, Jean-Christian Bourcart worked with graphic artist Ben Salesse to acquire some of these photographs and place them beside quotations from American author John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s writings and wrathful incantations bring out strange parallels between the 1929 crisis, which led to tragic migrations within the United States, and the disturbances of our own times. The times and crises seem to echo each other, while the actions overlap: the original photographs that have holes punched in them by Stryker, are tagged by Bourcart and Sales, with writings by Steinbeck… What emerges are composite pieces charged with different energies. The documentary images are enriched by fictional texts, the plastic dimension of the work is extended by an openly committed, political stance, and the archive recovers its burning relevance, taking its place in a dialectic between obliteration and invention.
With the support of the Nicéphore Niépce Museum.
FESTIVAL
PORTRAIT(S)
From June 10th to September 4th, 2016
The Damn Came, But no Day
Jean-Christian Bourcart
Centre Culturel Valery-Larbaud
03200 Vichy
France
https://www.ville-vichy.fr/agenda/festival-portraits-2016
http://www.jcbourcart.com
