"High school as you had never seen it" : when I suggested that theme for the exhibition of the photo-club, the avowed aim was to take pictures of all those details you no longer see even though they're right in front of you every day. The unavowed aim was to be able to visit the venerable building of the school backstage, and more especially to find a way to climb the little pinnacle and its big clock on the roof of the older buidlding. The results were beyond my expectations, as we were finaly authorised to spend a whole day in the deserted school during holidays, with a teacher (duly equipped with her own camera) and one of her friend, a photographer, and... with a big bunch of keys opening all the doors. Yes, even the one leading to the pinnacle ! There again, no disappointment : the stairs leading to it seems is worthy to be in the labyrinth stairs of Umberto Eco's Name of the rose, the attics are wonderful, the chairs and tables cimetery in the cellar fascinating.
Click here to see a few pictures taken that day.
Since everybody has the possibility to show a more personal work during the collective exhibition, I chose to present very close-up pictures of stationery (even now that I no longer go to school, I always visit the stationery corners in the shops), paper, pens, calligraphy nibs on my mother's old school pictures as she went to the same high school. I wanted to see whether it was possible to take a picture of a writing page reflecting in the nib of an ink-pen like in a mirror : the result was the insect, the first of many calliphotographies.
Click here to see a few examples of calliphotographies.
Calliphotographies : how ? why ?
I suppose the idea comes from the boring classes during which I observed that phenomenon with my ink-pen on my notebooks. I wanted to take extremely close-up pictures, and I was lucky enough to find the material I needed without going very far : I just borrowed my father's
A pile of dictionaries to heighten the subjects of the pictures, an anglepoise lamp, sometimes a few tries with only daylight, my work was always empirical. In fact, those close-close-ups always created blur zones in the pictures, and I never knew how blurred it would be : fetching my pictures was every time a surprise, good or bad, but I really enjoyed how it gave a nebulous effect to the subject.
In the beginning, the principle was to use writing instruments as reflecting surfaces (like in the "gnomons" serie where a ) but I finally ended using other stuffs that had no longer anything to do with writing : for instance, on many of my pictures (like the left one here), what you see is, well, a big laddle from my grand-mother's silverware ! (that was the only time I used it in my life, by the way).
Except for the pictures I took about a special theme (spring, music...) for contests, what is written always makes sense for me. It was, in a way, a kind of tribute to Baudelaire, Montaigne, Bachelard or Shakespeare...