Query id by artwork and pictures

1Since its inception, visible artist Stéphanie Solinas has contributed to the atelier-laboratoire (tutorial programme) on sociophotography, supporting pictures college students on the ENS Louis Lumière with their inventive outputs (see article “Sociophotography: A methodology for building a critical imaginaire of digital technologies” of Sophie Jehel). Her creative course of is especially attention-grabbing in the way in which she weaves collectively a documentary dimension and a conceptual method to investigation. This results in the elaboration of inventive protocols that incorporate experimental parts, typically near interview-based and observation-based sociological approaches, with nice creativity. The basic points on the coronary heart of her analysis—id, perception, presence of the invisible—overlap with the important thing themes of the Sciences of Information and Communication (SIC). In the interview we carried out along with her, we needed to discover the query of her relation to pictures and documentary.

Sophie Jehel: Dear Stéphanie, we needed to interview you not solely as a result of you may have been contributing to our atelier-laboratoire on sociophotography since its inception, but in addition as a result of we predict that your works, being on the crossroads of visible creation and the examination of key analysis points within the sciences of knowledge and communication, corresponding to id, surveillance and fact, are significantly inspiring for our venture in understanding a few of the up to date orientations in pictures and research-creation.

Véronique Figini: Could you inform us what your definition of documentary pictures is and in case your works are a part of this method? With Sophie, now we have created the idea of sociophotography to seek advice from photographic works that don’t solely belong to the realm of documentary, however cross over freer types of creation. Does this idea converse to you?

Stéphanie Solinas: There are a number of potential avenues. The first reply I might give is that, the truth is, I don’t essentially outline my work. I don’t imply to keep away from the query: it really is a selection. Any definition is a framework delimiting one thing, which is helpful, however what pursuits me in my observe is being in a dynamic place, a spot of analysis with questions, reasonably than responses.

The place I stand for is that of the artist, within the fields of artwork and of pictures—however these are very broad. I’m inquisitive about transferring throughout completely different practices, reasonably than segmenting them. Because in my work, in the long run, the thought is commonly to carry collectively completely different views [regards], various kinds of data, various kinds of experience, completely different fields, completely different tales, and to hunt what connects them, reasonably than what separates them.

Having stated that, the difficulty of definition pursuits me; I discover it attention-grabbing to understand how a piece is obtained, the place it echoes, the way it can query the boundaries of definition of disciplines and might be able to create bridges.

In 2016, Gilles Saussier invited me to exhibit in dialogue with him on the Photographic Centre of Île-de-France, as a part of a retrospective exhibition of his work. We labored inside a type of change, of mirror. He’s an artist who beforehand labored as a photojournalist and was awarded by World Press Photo in 1990. In an interview with Étienne Hatt for Art Press journal, he talks about my work in relation to this documentary dimension.

V.F.: This assembly between your profile and his profile is fascinating.

(Stéphanie Solinas seems for the article and reads out loud a passage)

S.S.: The article (Hatt, 2016) begins like this: requested “What, today, differentiates reportage and documentary work??,” he responds “four distinctive traits of documentary work: the predominance of portraiture (whereas photojournalism privileges genre or action scenes), portraits of people just as much as buildings (as Lincoln Kirstein said about Walker Evans’s American Photographs), industrial structures for Bernd and Hilla Becher, plants for Karl Blossfeldt; a preference for suites of photos whose logic is not that of a photo essay and still less symbolic images, but rather that of an underlying protocol, which makes documentary practice akin to conceptualism and artist’s books (John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham); a passion for collection, in the cases of Bernd Becher and Evans, for whom a photographer was a collector who collects with his eyes; and, finally, a penchant for playing the rag-picker of history for whom the most telling things are not what posterity thinks but what didn’t last, fleeting things and other items plucked from the trashcan of yesteryear.[…] Based on these criteria, and despite appearances. Stéphanie Solinas is a perfect example of a documentary photographer.” (Laugh)

That’s what I had in thoughts. Perhaps it’s a protracted ellipsis to return to this, however…

S.J.: Excellent! We can then name you a documentary photographer.

V.F.: The “despite appearances” is fascinating.

S.S.: (Laugh) Yes, as a result of my work has typically been known as conceptual too. And I assumed it was attention-grabbing, the truth is, that Gilles would use such an argument. And I imagine that there’s a conceptual dimension and a documentary dimension in my work. I’ve an actual attachment to phrases [parole], to be nearer in that strategy to the truth of this matter which regularly shapes it [my work].

S.J.: In your work, the investigative dimension is each a supply of inspiration and of creativeness. But if you say, “the field of photography is broad,” it’s additionally since you go a lot past the sphere of pictures. You could use sculpture, folding, you might organise a symposium, within the poetic sense of the time period.

S.J.: (Laugh) This detournement of phrases is pleasant. Because you cope with topics corresponding to id and surveillance by establishing shifts in phrases, just like the consultative comity for instance, don’t you?

S.S.: The Consultative Comity for the Description of Dominique Lambert, sure, that’s the precise time period.

V.F.: I wouldn’t have described your work as documentary pictures as a result of given all of the references you supplied, you do one thing utterly completely different. I believe we haven’t but provide you with the suitable phrases to explain your work.

S.S.: (Laugh) If you discover them… I’m .

V.F.: I’ll give it some thought as a result of what’s fascinating is the way in which wherein you method this definition by saying “From the place where I stand.”

S.S.: One is at all times in a particular place. Then, it’s not essentially easy to outline this very place. And possibly it’s exactly the opposite that helps us situate ourselves. It is by going deeper into the boundaries of pre-determined classes that, maybe, we additionally find out about this place from the place we converse, and which can be troublesome to outline as such.

The problem of protocol is vital for me, like these of strategies and methods. The completely different phases I exploit, I’m speaking of Dominique Lambert, the completely different instruments of id illustration I exploit, are official instruments. What pursuits me is that any device of illustration is just not impartial, any means of illustration is just not impartial. Each time, there’s a transmission of knowledge—that’s why we use it— however there may be additionally a lack of info and a creation of knowledge on this transmission.

In the programs utilizing police sketches and figures of experience, this dimension of loss and creation of knowledge tends to be eradicated. What pursuits me in Dominique Lambert is, reasonably than eliminating it, to utilise it, and to take a look at this very place which in any case is inevitable.

That’s why the work of Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of forensic anthropometry within the 19^th century, is a piece that continues to draw me: due to this perception in photographic objectivity and within the objectivity of illustration, on which he based mostly his system. In the tip, all his system attests to the impossibility of the objectivity of illustration—by writing 2 hundred pages on signaletic pictures (the title of his guide printed in 1885), he clearly says that pictures is just not signaletic as such. That pictures is just not a sampling of the true. And, on the similar time, that it isn’t utterly surpassed, that’s why it’s nonetheless on our ID playing cards. All his system goals to circumscribe it however, paradoxically, makes its imperfect, human and artistic dimension perceptible, and that’s what pursuits me.

V.F.: When I work on pictures, I typically take into consideration Edgar Morin’s complexity idea. François Cheval argued that the “photographic” is what helps finally to raised circumscribe, if something, pictures in all its varieties. Photography is a fabric that matches all varieties, that’s in all places. What’s your view on the time period “photographic”?

S.J.: What characterises your method, Stéphanie, is it not reasonably to query pictures?

S.S.: Yes, I’m to query pictures. It is in my relation to Bertillon’s work that it grew to become obvious to me that pictures is a device that has established us as people in our unicity confronted with the collective, in addition to in a essential relation to the collective for us to exist. And it’s a method of being on this planet and of wanting on the world too.

It is the dimension of the device and of method. Photography belongs to a time of human historical past which, it appears to me, remains to be ongoing right now: the 19^th century relation to science and positivism, to this concept of seeing higher. Today, our perception in materialist science, which considers that the world can merely be defined by relational materialist phenomena, belongs to this family tree. It appears to me that pictures is each a product of this very period and, on the similar time, from the very starting, additionally a device for questioning this actuality. Since, as early because the 19^th century, it’s used as a part of scientific processes—the astronomer Jules Janssen refers to pictures as “the retina of the scientist”—in addition to in spiritualism to seize refined and invisible presences.

That’s the explanation why scientists, students and 19^th century figures are current in my work. It is Charcot’s “why not?,” a mix of doubt and can, and it’s a curiosity which tackles all fields of information. In the 19^th century, pictures is concurrently used to seize ghosts from a spiritualist perspective and to {photograph} delinquents from a scientific perspective—at all times as a device to advance data.

V.F.: What I admire in your work is the encyclopaedic side.

S.S.: Yes, it’s an impulse, and on the similar time I’m exactly not a 18^th century encyclopaedist, nor a 19^th century police officer (Laugh). I actually am a 21^st century artist, I’ve additionally absorbed the absurd dimension of the encyclopaedia, its impossibility. I stay on this planet of the web (Laugh).

S.J.: When you say that you just needed to point out the impossibility of the encyclopaedia, the impossibility of objectivity, would you endorse this time period of vital documentary pictures?

S.S.: What issues to me is to not take current innovations for everlasting fact, like questioning what is usually given as immutable. That’s why the difficulty of historical past pursuits me, not less than that of the lineage of concepts and instruments. Therefore, vital as necessitating reflection, within the sense of vital pondering, in that sense, sure.

S.S.: When you speak in regards to the problem of limits, I come again to this “why not?,” which for me is a robust formulation. Jean-Martin Charcot, the primary neurologist, had requested his son as a toddler: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The little Jean-Baptiste’s reply was: “Sailor.” To his father who had responded by saying “Nonsense!,” the kid had stated: “Why not?” When aged 18 he tried to go down this highway, his father advised him: “You will study medicine.” And so, he grew to become a physician like his father, on the Salpêtrière Hospital like his father. But when his father died, he left every part and had his first boat constructed which he named the Pourquoi Pas?.

Years later, he met his personal dying within the Pourquoi Pas? IV after his boat sank ten kilometres from Reykjavik. I borrow this identify for my work [The Why Not?] which explores the invisible worlds rising from Iceland, whether or not from the world of the useless, the world of elves, the telluric forces, or from genetic hyperlinks. I like this concept of standing by this line of a “why not?.” It is just not due to this fact a matter of taking place to say whether or not it exits or not, whether or not one ought to imagine in it or not.

Myself, I don’t see them, so I’ve to see them by different individuals’s eyes. But what pursuits me is that these testimonies actually exist. I need to carry them my consideration and, due to them, widen the sphere of prospects and see what occurs. Since, be they actual or not, these invisible varieties have an effect in the true.

For lots of people I’ve met, their life decisions are based mostly on this very invisible. Ultimately, the query is: what are we to do if certainly “why not?,” and what does it do, what’s the impact of this “why not?” in the true? It’s opening up a area of prospects, and making room for the invisible, that’s why I talked in regards to the problem of categorisations and of limits, to discover locations of porosity.

S.J.: You say: “I don’t take sides”; however in actuality, what you’re employed on is just not a lot on the article of beliefs however on beliefs themselves. What you’re staging are social approaches, that are the social actuality of those beliefs, by the vary of media you employ and the testimonies you collect. In a one way or the other scientific method, you draw upon what exists from these beliefs, that’s to say the beliefs themselves. In your creations, you commend them to some extent, for instance within the parallel you make between the type of the human mind, Iceland’s geography and that of the mediumistic factors. There is an anthropological dimension in your work, isn’t it?

S.S.: What is for certain is that I care deeply about this query of perception, which is what shapes us, which is concurrently one thing very bodily, very corporeal, one thing observable, and it’s additionally our reminiscence, the generations previous us, our spirituality, our beliefs.

The query of id lies right here. But on the similar time, I believe this time period is difficult. I’d love to have the ability to lay it on a desk, similar to that, and say: “here it is, this is what I am, this is what we are,” however after all it resists; and simply as effectively that it resists—as a result of what shapes us can be on this resistance. What eludes us too is the substance that shapes us and, no doubt, its most singular side. Therefore, my work additionally seeks to understand what’s elusive on this means of illustration.

V.F.: There is a number of humour in your work too, however I might say that it’s a severe humour.

S.S.: Humour is vital and belongs to poetry. I really feel that it’s a part of our acceptance of the human situation (Laugh). There are so many questions and so little solutions.

S.J.: Compared to conceptual artists, I’m struck by the complexity of the protocols you invent, which might be associated to a great data of scientific programs. You give them a barely parodic dimension, however by an moral reflection. The concept that id can’t be contained is an moral and even political viewpoint.

Therefore, this step to the facet is a inventive dimension of analogy.