“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
May 2012, Paris, France. On my daily walk, I found a box containing lots of photographs, negatives and some other objects, which someone left by the trash. This project is what I made with the photos I found. They are the work of a stranger, who is not so uknown to me anymore. They can be the photos of anyone's life.
Several years later, I was offered the opportunity to show the photos in an exhibition, in which I made a space for them and around them, containing also the other works that I have built around the collection of photographs. Here is a video from the exhibition, and bellow it, a video with burning negatives from the Box.
The end of love, the mortality of the human, the brief passing, the nothingness that our life can be.
That's what I felt when I looked at these photos. I tried reconstructing the life, whose brief fragments I saw before me on the moldy photographs. Brief instants, which were making up about 30 years of someone's life. Thirty years going by so quickly for me, the spectator of a part of his fate. Even though I knew nothing about him, I could feel something through those, mostly very neutral, images.
I noticed different women on the pictures. Someone, who was probably a close relative, a sister I think. Some other woman, who I confused with the first one, but realized it probably was one of the first girlfriends. And then other women. One appeared only on one photo, but the way he held her, and the look in her eyes, made it clear they were together, and in love. The last girlfriend, before the end of the pictures. Probably encountered in his Asian travels.
To see all of them, and how little was left of their loves, made me profoundly melancholic. I connect it with my own life, and the often disappounting search for someone to share it with. When I first worked on the photos (washing them, etc...), I was trying to forget a passionate unrequited love, which was haunting me still a year after it was over. I felt like it would never go away. It went away, of course. But then, a new one came. And then one after that. Can we ever find peace? It seems to lie in the moments of between. The empty moments in time. The view of sunny skyscraper panorama from the hotel window in Shanghai. Of old American cars on a dirty African driveway. Of the overexposed palms on a white beach. Of the sunset walk, 20 years ago, with an aunt and her little girl, a memory of laughter, of a day in the park, of red balloons and a lonely clown.