Contact : marie-jose.lacour@videotron.ca

Over the last few years, along my daily assignments as a freelance photographer, I have pursued and developed a personal body of work where the raw quality of photographic material takes over the representational function usually assigned to photography. This work aims at exploring memory traces.

The photo-narrative of Nomade (1991), the near animistic still-life of Objets de mémoire (1996) and the impressionist Polaroid tableaus of Boarding pass (2000) were repeated forays within the different aesthetics aspects of subjective photography.

The Passengers series is another attempt in this latter direction. Colour, matter and even form - to a certain extent - are the vectors that I alter digitally in order to produce a quality of substance conjuring the fleeting sense of reality that I am trying to convey.

Since there is an a-priori blurring of the initial recording, the image - through the many layers of its evolution - gains a fictive property that allows great liberty of expression. The title is an integral part of the image. Like the primary shot that mutates (through digital alterations) until the image is finally anchored, the writing itself is a signifier that undergoes numerous and often visible rewrites. There again, the tension, modulations and innuendos of calligraphy speaks of an immediate physical presence and stand for a non-filtered expression of some state of mind. The resulting piece is an extreme sort of Haïku that brings the whole edifice of text and image to its final hybrid form between icon and a poster.

Serge Emmanuel Jongué

Montréal, November 2003