“Need” or the eloquent silence of photography
“Entends ce bruit fin qui est continu, et qui est le silence.
Écoute ce qu’on entend lorsque rien ne se fait entendre”
(Paul Valéry, Tel quel II, 1943).
Images, sometimes, impose themselves into the silence of a gaze without need to say too much ... As a fabulous alchemist of time, reality and chance, photography can be - and it’s the case here - the fruit of an inner need. The title "Need" given by Nathalie Lescuyer to this open suite of images attests to this need, undoubtedly, vital.
They, undoubtely, express some inner resistance to human beings’ own forgetfulness and human and cultural values deterioration by politics are silently revealed.
What is heard here is a double silence : the author’s inner silence facing the noise of the world and migrants’ excluded speech, the silence of Art reaching us through an aesthetic experience close to prayer.
This aesthetics is not pointless. It is also an ethics as it offers us an extraordinary encounter: Discovering the world and ourselves as otherness.
There, lurks hope: in "the pursuit of the unconditional truth of facts" (Tarkovski), the only experience that can transform, elevate us.
Jean-Baptiste Guey
Gallery Les Bains révélateurs