Momentanés

In this project, which I like to call Momentanés, I wished to fully assume a strategy which is the exact contrary of the doctrine of the decisive instant -exemplified most notably by Cartier-Bresson-, where the composition of the image and captation of the scene coïncide in a stroke of time. This fusion of the documentary and the compositional is no obligation and the photographer may wish to construct an image of more than the one and only instant freezed by the shutter. My object here is the extended unity of a place and a moment made up of a multiplicity of small events.

The specificity of constructed art is the distance in time -physical and psychological- between conception and realization. The action of the painter is similar to the architect's in that gap between the idea and the final done thing. There is a path that has to be trodden -concept, composition, execution- which is the contrary of the coïncidence between idea and gesture in action painting.

Similarly for photography one can envision a sizable distanciation between the compositional work and its concretisation. But here, the distance is measured in the opposite direction, the starting point being the concrete situation whose mechanical captation is the material process of photography.

I choose this place, in the Cinquantenaire park in Brussels, which afforded an interesting balance between mineral and vegetal and sky geometries, and sometimes surprising patterns of movement by the people present there and then. For a whole summer -of 2010-, I recorded different moments of the days and the nights, always from the same spot in the same direction with the same lens.

Even if I wanted just to record an instant, the restitution of the true perception of the scene implies a multiple recording of the skies and the grounds, as shown by the technique of high dynamic range (HDR) photography.

23/8/2010, 19.50h-19.52h.Impression digitale 48x32cm.

The resulting constructed image reproduces a succession of moods and micro-events whose sense and coherence shall be realized later as a recorded fiction.

The whole series of 32 digital prints was shown in the City Hall of Etterbeek in february 2012.

Invitation and text :

My walks in Brussels often lead me through the Parc du Cinquantenaire. On the west side, i.e. towards the city, there is vast empty space slit in two by a road tunnel. On both sides, large lawns limited by screens of plane trees.

Here in june 2010 I started to record the scenes that were offered to our sight under three sorts of geometries :

The users

Here can be observed th daily back and forth trips between the office quarters of the center and the residential quarters of Etterbeek and Woluwe, on foot or bicycle. And there is all the various activities of leisure you can find in a public garden.

The garden

The ground layout offers oppositions between mineral and vegetal, the straight lines of the paths and the profusion of the foliage.

The skies

The sky, well visible in this wide open space, is a canvas where nature displays all the shades of forms between regularity and chaos.

The construction of images : the instant and the moment

Photography is not meant to capture passively the afforded reality. There is a work involved. The first distance from the given is inferred by a will to reproduce our natural perception, and to unite in one photography the exposure for high lights (the sky and the clouds) and the low lights (what goes on on the ground).

A number of photographs taken from the same point of view with different exposures are combined to recover the natural perception.

We entertain this logic which makes the image not an instantané, mais un momentané, a constructed image whose material is a suite of smal events captured on a time-span of a few minutes. The micro-events are recombined to produce the moment as lived.

Clearly there is a selection of the more significant elements, those which will give the tonality of our remembrance of the moment.

From moment to season

Now my care for duration could find a fuller expression through the constituion of a series of moments spred out on a few months. The variations are captured through the device of making the geometric conditions invariable : the camera is set up always at the same place, in the same direction, and with the same lens. With those perspective conditions unchanging, I captured the changing forms and lights of the whole summer of 2010.