Not everyone can see. It takes a great eye and a great mind, and the liberation of that mind, to be able to transform the mundane, the everyday, the vernacular β into art. The density of his photographs is incredible β their atmosphere thick and heavy; revealing and beautiful. It confers a density that is entirely foreign to their real existence.
They are there, one might say, for the first time, but at the same time for the last. The photograph could be taken at night, but it is day! The small amount of sunlight falls on the tied-back curtain in the doorway; the crumpled mat lies outside the door; the two doors compete for our visual attention β one the solid presence that holds up the left hand side of the image, the other the vanishing point in the distance; and the eye is led down to this door by the pavement and the gutter with a band of water emphasising the form.
But then the mysteryβ¦ what is going on above the ancient door at the rear β the sky, a ceiling, another wall lit by the last rays of the sun? Such a dense, complex image that requires an intimate knowledge of the mystery of place, in both the artist and the viewer. In our world today of Insta-photos, millions and millions of photographs that mean basically nothing, and where anyone without training can pick up a camera and think of themselves a photographer, there is something to be said for taking the time to train and educate your eye and your mind.
Only then might you reveal something about the world and, possibly, yourself as well. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past.
The natural thing in that situation is for the model to pose honestly. The night finds us and surprises us by its strangeness; it liberates in us the forces that, during the day, are dominated by reason. It disturbes and surprises us with its strangeness.
