Anne-Lise Broyer — À propos — Slash Paris

Two or three notes about my work…

Since I both graduated as a photographer and a typographer, my practice of photography is therefore peculiar, eager to simultaneously follow paths of graphic design, drawing and writing; looking through this hybridization to generate a kind of photographic literature, questioning the link between photography and artist books and trying to bring an unusual research in the display design of each one of my exhibition. My series all have in common a narrative framework, given by a text or novel I have read. I do not tend to illustrate, but it’s as a reader that I confront the world, and the experience of photography often merges with the exceptional experience of reading. I think that I may honestly say that what initiated and still launches the creative act for me, is the experience of reading. Finally, isn’t it each image I produce the transcription of a more or less old disturbance forged by my readings? Places which I photography haven’t been read before being actually seen? As if, while taking pictures, I was moving forward inside my vision, like proceeding in the reading of a book, in a kind of acuity similar to a hypnotic state… as if I was diving, submerged by the world. This is why I quickly got into photography without any artifice, often feeling fighting against the current or feeling very isolated in the field of contemporary photography. I have chosen a very modest mechanically controlled camera and a 50 mm lens in order to give a large contribution to sight. I’mstill an analog photography user, to be closer to the film, this sensitive strip where is written, imprinted the image. In this fragment of time of full darkness, lies the fantasy, rather quirky, that when the mirror flips up, not only the light is reflected but also the thought of the photographer, or both at the same time. The camera like a prosthesis. The black and white was chosen because of the color of the text, something like gray matter, as if each dot of the paper print was a letter, a font, like a watermark, invisible to a naked eye, reminiscence, archeology of the text. I have chosen a heavy camera, which determines my gestures, slow gestures. I had quickly understood thatmy goal would not be to capture action, but its background. I chose still images rather than motion pictures, because I consider I had to setmyself intomotion, becausemotion lies in the viewer movements inside the exhibition room, but also when browsing pages of a book… Precisely, contemplate silence as a goal, tend to a thinking form rather than a form of thinking, it was and still is “paint not the form but the effect it produces” (Mallarmé)… The economy of the Less contributes to this slowing down; an image should remain scarce, it is rare. I believe like Hervé Guibert, critic and photographer, that the practice of photography has no particular interest for me apart from the resistance I feel towards this practice. My practice is therefore restrained and cautious. My interest for this practice is also motivated, by a permanent dialog it can maintain with the other arts.Movie editing (montage) is borrowed to cinema to create the internal rhythmof a book, but it could also be the ‘fast-cut’ or the ‘long take’… I think of the cineast Robert Bresson, in his Notes sur le cinématographe (Notes on Cinematography): “An image should transformitself through contact with other images, like a color in contact with other colors”. Eventually, isn’t it the “in-between images” what I really care for? Thus I give spectators the freedomto compose with the combination of forms I offer him, like an established set where he could inhabit. Believing that an image can still reveal itself under his eye, “an image belongs to who looks at it” (Marcel Duchamp)… My practice of photography which I have been conducting for 12 years, in the actual geography of art and insidemy generation, is difficult to maintain because of its quietness and delicacy; it refers to a distant realness, difficult to apprehend, respected, only catching signs of places, and their mysteries…Very far fromspectacular and narrative compositions often found in contemporary photography.

Anne-Lise Broyer work’s, in France, is represented by the Galerie Particulière (Paris, France) and published by the Éditions Filigranes.