#elisa larvego

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De l’esthétique du documentaire par Elisa Larvego

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Samedi 12 octobre 2019.

 Jour de vernissage au centre photographique d’Ile de France, à Pontault-Combault. Je m’y rends pour deux raisons : l’un des huit photographes *exposé est Jean Larive, un copain et membre de l’agence MYOP, et pour le thème « Réinventer Calais », ville où je me suis rendu à plusieurs reprises. Je suis curieux de voir le travail des photographes sur cette thématique. Rien à redire sur l’exposition, je me garderai de critiquer les photographes, j’ai bien entendu plus d’affinités avec certains travaux que d’autres, mais tout cela est normal.

Je rentre à Paris par le RER, et ne compulserai que le lendemain le petit livret édité par le CPIF et qui renseigne sur l’exposition collective.

Ce que j’y ai lu m’a beaucoup surpris. En premier les photographies sont présentées comme des œuvres. Je veux bien, mais j’avais plutôt entendu parler de l’œuvre de H. Cartier Bresson, de Robert Frank, de Eugene Smith et de bien d’autres photographes qui avaient photographié toute leur vie, pour laisser au monde une œuvrefaite de centaines de photographies. L’interprétation que je fais du mot œuvre doit sans doute être différente de celle faite par les personnes qui ont réalisées ce petit livret.

Quelques pages plus loin je lis une définition de la photographie documentaire :

« La majeure partie des travaux présentés ici s’inscrit dans le cadre de ce que l’on nomme la photographie documentaire.

Née à la fin du 19èmesiècle, la photographie documentaire se développe à partir des années 1920. Il ne s’agit pas seulement de regarder le monde, mais-par l’image-de tenter de le faire comprendre, parfois même de contribuer à le changer. En ce sens, la photographie documentaire est animée d’une volonté toute à la fois critique et active.Elle se distingue ainsi du photojournalisme, plus soumis à des impératifs évènementiels, économiques, et parfois considéré comme manquant de rigueur éthique, voire sensationnaliste.

Les photographes documentaires oscillent entre le désir de neutre (montrer ce qui est, trouver la distance juste par rapport au sujet) et la volonté d’affirmer une subjectivité.De ce fait, la frontière entre photographie documentaire et photographie artistique est peut-être floue ».

Ainsi donc le petit monde de la photographie est partagé entre les bons photographes, ceux qui pratiquent la photographie documentaire, noble et presque artistique, et les autres, ceux qui se vendent au plus offrant, qui manquent d’éthique et de rigueur, les petits photographes. Définition méprisante, condescendante contre une partie de la profession qui paye souvent par le sang son engagement et dont la qualité de travail est souvent remarquable, que l’on arrête d’opposer les photographes et leurs pratiques, qui sont d’ailleurs souvent interchangeables.

Dimanche vers midi il y avait un match pour la coupe du monde de rugby entre l’Ecosse et le Japon, un match magnifique comme je n’en avais pas vu depuis longtemps. En rugby, il peut y avoir des échauffourées, mais le respect entre adversaires prévaut et le rugby  en sort vainqueur. Cela serait bien que les modes de pensées dans le monde de la photo s’en inspirent et évoluent !

* Les huit photographes sont : Lofti Benyelles, Claire Chevrier, Jean Larive, Elisa Larvego, Laurent Malone, André Mérian, Gilles Raynaldy et Aimée Thiron.

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“RÉINVENTER CALAIS” 

Exposition des œuvres de Lotfi Benyelles, Claire Chevrier, Jean Larive, Elisa Larvego, Laurent Malone, André Mérian, Gilles Raynaldy et Aimée Thirion, réalisées dans le cadre de la commande photographique éponyme du Centre national des arts plastiques et du PEROU

Du 5 Octobre au 22 Décembre 2019 Le CPIF (Centre photographique d’Île de France) présente les travaux réalisés dans le cadre de la commande photographique « Réinventer Calais »*.

Commissariat : Pascal Beausse et Nathalie Giraudeau

Réinventer Calais s’inscrit dans la continuité de l’action que mène l’association PEROU « parce qu’il est question de soigner le regard que collectivement nous portons sur Calais. Parce qu’il est question de renverser les évidences, et de cultiver enfin le récit d’une ville-monde aujourd’hui écrasé par une iconographie du pire. Parce qu’il est question de faire place enfin à cette "ville invisible" constituée de la matière des constructions, des rêves, des relations, des commerces en tout genre qui font effectivement lieu. Parce qu’il est question de rendre publique une autre écriture politique, et d’entendre enfin la New Jungle de Calais comme "tiers paysage". » (Sébastien Thiéry, coordinateur des actions du PEROU)

Vernissage : Samedi 12 octobre à 15h

http://www.cpif.net/fr/programme/reinventer-calais-cnap/genres=exposition

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Be Arielle F. / Short Theatre

Be Arielle F. / Short Theatre

Il visual artist svizzero Simon Senn porta a Roma Be Arielle F., una performance incentrata su un reale scambio di identità e di genere attraverso l’ausilio delle tecnologie digitali. (more…)

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Artists: Christine Jornod, Elisa Larvego, Samuel Lecocq, Florent Meng, Mélanie Veuillet

Venue: Air de Paris

Exhibition Title: Littéralement et dans tous les sens

Curated by: Bruno Serralongue

Date: March 24 – May 19, 2018

Curated by: Bruno Serralongue

Click here to view slideshow

Samuel Lecocq, Fragility and Obsolescence, 2017, HD video, 10 minutes 10 seconds looped

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images and video courtesy of Air de Paris, Paris. Photos by Marc Domage. 

Press Release:

The exhibition Littéralement et dans tous les sens brings together five artist-photographers who studied at some point in their career at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) where I teach Information/fiction since its creation in 2011. Far from being a retrospective and without attempting to show the diversity and wealth that characterizes the practice of photography at the school, the exhibition, which does not have a specific theme, is intentionally subjective. First shown at Centre de la Photographie Genève by Joerg Bader, it enables me to experiment and by holding another role, allows me to express a certain stance with regard to photography. However, the exhibition Littéralement et dans tous les sens is not a manifesto, although perhaps the title can be read as one. It is an excerpt from a letter by Arthur Rimbaud to his mother and to me, it seemed appropriate for a photography exhibition.

Photography has often been criticized for being too literal. Even today, a certain element of mistrust prevails with regard to the medium, even if it is no longer viewed in the same terms as it was in the 19th century, when it was criticized not for its inability to choose one element to focus on in a composition, but for describing everything literally, without hierarchy, and with the same precision. For this reason, it could never compete with painting (in other words, a photograph would never be an artistic image). Lots of photographers have literally proved that photography is not painting, in every sense possible. And this demonstration pushed them to define what exactly photography was—sometimes even placing it outside art. For example, in 1981 in the text of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Ils se disent peintres, ils se disent photographes, Michel Nuridsany quoted a statement made by Christian Boltanski during a discussion about the aforementioned exhibition: ‘Photography is photo journalism, the rest is painting’. As recently as 2006, Jeff Wall admitted that he himself had led a struggle against a certain idea of photography, that of reportage, but that he had lost, that photography is always reportage, and that he felt ‘rather happy to have lost’. Undoubtedly these two artists were referring, each in their own way, to the same thing: that ‘the photographic image that results from the process of recording, is not essentially, a product of the imagination’.

It’s true. One of photography’s most important operations is certainly not imagination but selection. This occurs at all stages in the production of a photographic image. It begins with the choice of subject, the terrain into which the photographer plans to delve, and continues right up to the moment of the shot and beyond, to all stages of post-production. Every photographic project begins with a decision. Interestingly, the word terrain resonates strongly with the notion of movement. As everyone knows: in order to take photographs, one needs to move. Raising the question as to where. The destination is certainly important but on the condition that this is not the sole criteria of the artwork. I think that none of the five photographers participating in this exhibition was especially interested in depicting the reality of the Alps, Mexico, or a refugee camp in Calais. Of course, by choosing to go to a certain place, their photographs are the record of the specific data of each place. But beyond these specifics, each and every one of these photographers is on a quest to capture the present time, the actuality, and in so doing, they designate the direction of a future, not always a cheerful one for that matter, particularly for the Western world, where incarceration appears as the dominant image of our way of life and it looks as though this is set to last, or so these photographs seem to tell us.

Mélanie Veuillet in her series Tools of Disobedience photographed objects illegally made by inmates inside Swiss prisons: objects used for comfort, defence, attack or escapism. Samuel Lecocq on the other hand, visits the first and only deradicalization centre in France, where he attempts to understand how enclosure is intended to put offenders back on the right track. But where exactly is this track and which one is the right one? Does it lead through the desert? Is it a path that puts people’s lives at risk as they attempt to migrate to the first world, attracted by its wealth and abundance? This is what Florent Meng seems to suggest in the series realized on the border between Mexico and the US, in the town of Sasabe. Or is it a path that leads to a makeshift camp on the French coast opposite England? Does one need to hurl oneself against the walls of mountains and climb them at the risk of losing one’s life?

Through their studies, each of these five photographers has learned that the terrain is saturated with media-friendly images and that it is through such images that we read and understand the world. But more important than this, they have learned to combat such representations through a meticulous work on form. It is for this reason that these photographs and video share a certain sense of peace. It is from a boat floating peacefully on the river Loire on a sunny afternoon that a woman’s voice tells us about the deradicalization centre in Samuel Lecocq’s video Fragility and Obsolescence. When people are photographed, they seem relaxed, confident. By choosing to have volunteers pose for photographs alongside refugees in the series Chemin des Dunes, Elisa Larvego voluntarily challenges (our?) police-like tendencies to identify and categorize. The horizontal shots of the Arizona desert by Florent Meng and vertical shots of the Alps by Christelle Jornod are strikingly beautiful. Their clear and limpid composition reinforce the impression of insurmountable barriers.

We see the world through form. This idea has allowed me to think about fiction in the way that Philippe Dubois imagines it in a text on contemporary photography. For him, fiction is the best way of theoretically apprehending the status of the contemporary photographic image. In this way, photography is no longer the trace of ‘something “that was there” in the real world but something “that is here” in front of us, something we can accept (or reject), not as a trace of something that once was, but for what it is, or more precisely for what it shows itself to be: a “possible world”, neither more nor less, but one which exists in parallel with the real or actual world’. (3). Here, it’s about not forgetting the representation of the actual world. Or rather, it’s about not leaving the representation of the actual world to those who rely on ‘it was’. It’s about opening up, in every sense of the word, the scope of perspectives and thinking about what constitutes the world. This is something done by all five of these artist-photographers.

Bruno Serralongue

(1) Jean-François Chevrier, ‘Documents de culture, documents d’expérience’ in Communications. Des faits et des gestes, no.79, Paris: Seuil, 2006, p. 63. The quotations by Jeff Wall are taken from the same issue of Communications, p. 187. (2) At the time of writing this text, I was reading a book by the philosopher Christiane Vollaire: Pour une philosophie de terrain. Taking inspiration from certain philosophers who had abandoned the ivory tower of philosophy for sociology and a commitment to action on the ground (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Simone Weil), she gives a brilliant and sensitive analysis on the motivations behind such a transition, of this descent towards the terrain, which she herself experienced. My insistence on the notion of ‘terrain’ owes much to her book. (3) Philippe Dubois, ‘De l’image-trace à l’image-fiction. Le mouvement des théories de la photographie de 1980 à nos jours’ in Etudes Photographiques, no. 34, 2016, p.60.

Link: “Littéralement et dans tous les sens” at Air de Paris

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from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2JVezQM

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Littéralement et dans tous les sens

Littéralement et dans tous les sens

Pour “Littéralement et dans tous les sens”, Bruno Serralongue, photographe et professeur à la HEAD-Genève depuis 2004, réunit cinq artistes et anciens étudiants de la HEAD-Genève, ayant choisi la photographie comme principale forme d’expression : Christelle Jornod, Elisa Larvego, Samuel Lecocq, Florent Meng et Mélanie Veuillet.

from Evene – Sélection Art http://ift.tt/2GLuely via IFTTT

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"Littéralement et dans tous les sens" at Air de Paris

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Elisa Larvego

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RENCONTRES D'ARLES 2018 

1968-2018, PRISE DE PAROLE / PRISE D’IMAGES

Jeudi 5 juillet - 16h00 - 18h00, Théâtre d’Arles. Ateliers et projections Pratiques alternatives de l’image sur les terrains actuels de conflit.  Table ronde, sur une proposition de Tënk, avec Elisabeth Perceval et Nicolas Klotz, Caroline Zéau, Elisa Larvego, et Louis Matton, durant les rencontres d’Arles. 

https://www.rencontres-arles.com/fr/1968-2018-prise-de-parole-prise-d-images

THURSDAY 5th JULY - 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM WORKSHOPS: 1968-2018, TAKING THE FLOOR/TAKING PICTURES ALTERNATIVE VISUAL PRACTICES IN CONFLICT-TORN AREAS 1968-2018, Taking the floor / taking pictures Conversations and projections with Elisabeth Perceval, Nicolas Klotz, Caroline Zéau, Elisa Larvego, Gilles Raynaldy, and Louis Matton, on a proposal from Tënk.

https://www.rencontres-arles.com/en/1968-2018-prise-de-parole-prise-d-images