“But I refuse to be the dupe of a kind of magic which is still more feeble than their own, and which brandishes before an eager public albums of coloured photographs, instead of the now vanished masks. Perhaps the public imagines that the charms of the savages can be appropriated through the medium of these photographs. Not content with eliminating savage life, and unaware of having done so, it feels the need feverishly to appease the nostalgic cannibalism of history with the shadows of those that history has already destroyed”
Claude Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane (p.41)
This series of photographs has been realized during different trips I made while I was residing in New Delhi for one year between 2006 and 2007. It deals with the notion of individuality in an Indian context. The exact locations of the pictures do not matter much since this is not a documentary work but rather a personal journey which aims at something universal.
The choice for this theme was first of all influenced by my general state of mind at that time. I had purposely decided to live in some part of the world where I could find something radically new and different from my own “civilization”. But soon after a few months of ecstatic aesthetical amazement before this bewildering universe that is India, I started to question deeply my way of looking at it. By that time, I had gone through Edward Said's book Orientalism, which definitely helped me to acknowledge the set of latent preconceptions embedded in foreigners' fascination for India. “Foreign photographers are the contemporary orientalists” I was thinking.
Paolo Pellizzari's work entitled “One Billion Indians” triggered something off in this reflection. Using a panoramic angle, the artist had captured daily scenes of India's turbulent city life and was thus fitting into this classical representation of Asiatic societies, that is gigantic, confused, noisy, crowded and finally beyond understanding. My first incentive was then to go against this traditional and somehow romantic imagery. Instead of the throng and the mass, I sought to focus on the “individual”.
Individuality is above all a concept, hence the challenge trying to capture it in image. For this, I could have chosen a kind of beatific and naive photography which celebrates humanity through pleasant smiles and conventional gazes but that would just have been the sterile product of a contradictory mind. I rather attempted to play with the sense of uniqueness and inviolability presupposed in the concept of individuality (etymologically : indivisible).
The individuals presented in this series are highly ephemeral. They are tiny dots, shadows or silhouettes, which only suggest the human presence but never impose it as a common place. Since their faces are not (easily) distinguishable, there is no possibility of “face-to-face relation” (as described by Levinas) between the “viewed” and the “viewer”, therefore no scope for the process through which the latter recognizes the former as an “Other.” We know that these individuals are subject but we cannot see them fully as such. As for the immensity of the spaces, emphasized by the recurrence of the sky and the sea, it asserts once more the relativity of these individuals.
Death is one of the various motifs of this work, opening with a scene of a cemetery which doesn't look so. The succession of picture then reproduces a zoom process, as if the viewer was gradually approaching the “individual”, but (we hope), never able to grasp it. The series is finally articulated along the four elements (Earth, Fire, Water, Air). Through this primitive natural philosophy, we can find a common essence for all human kind, thus transcending the artificial barriers of cultures.
Following the thread of this idea, I exhibited my work successively in India and in France, providing these two distinct audiences with a common ground for discussion.
I firmly believe in the responsibility of the photographer. Images are not neutral, they always carry out a discourse, whether it is conscious or not. I am a wanderer, like the ghosts visible in these scenes. This series relates my personal journey with them.
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