© Philippe Bazin, Sans titre, série ‘Nés’, 1998-1999

Dear Philippe, one of your last photographic works titled ‘Dans Paris’ and formerly titled ‘Les invisibles’, moved me in a way that only a few works have done before. Can you explain what that project is about, how it did happened and about your aesthetic, political choices and point of views?

Philippe Bazin (PB): Dear David, the work is really called ‘Dans Paris’. I abandoned the title ‘Les Invisibles’ for many reasons: the main one is that it refers to invisibility in terms of image. But, as we know, it’s not because you show the image of a person that this person becomes visible for everybody. Maybe, the media believe it, or would like us to believe it, but in fact, the possibility to be really visible in a public area is a political construction, not a media created one. And it gets more and more complicated. So, ‘Dans Paris’ is a photographic work on unseen migrants in Paris. This series of 36 photos shows 36 places in center town where a young migrant used to live before he was murdered in a public square near Gare de l'Est. The city looks empty, but each photograph was taken during week days and open hours. The images never show any migrant person, but show the impossibility for them to appear as citizens. That’s how ‘Dans Paris’ is a political/aesthetic project. The emptiness of the city is an aesthetic choice to show how local people are politically orchestrated not to see the migrants and how the society and the city has been built to have them visually secluded.

© Philippe Bazin, Sans titre, série Dans Paris, 2009-2011.

I would like to ask why you are a photographer of  lost causes? You seem to deny any possibility for your images to get sexy, and in some cases, even hangable on a wall: From the early ‘Faces: Les Vieillards’, that you photograph in order to stop forgetting them, to ‘Nés’ or ‘Les Antichambres’ or ‘Les Bourgeois de Calais’ or the ‘Battle Landscapes’ you are such a disturbing photographer producing such disturbing photographs… Why?

PB: Strange that you look my work as “lost causes”! I think,the opposite in that my subjects are in the middle of our society as signs we have to try to understand. They are our future. It was the case with the old people in the 80’s; and in France we waited the 2000’s to have a real engagment from the Government on the question. Actually, I’m interested in migration, not because it is in the air, but because I think it’s with migrants that the question of citizenship is strongly posed to all of us. We are living in post-colonial societies, nationalist european countries, and it seems to me that those concepts died a long time ago, with the two world wars of the XXe century. Migrants send us some good questions: where are the problems of our rich world which is abandoning democracy to the “benefit” of a Schengen Europe. The same with the new forms of protests in the last fifteen years against the globalisation of corruption, the dissemination of Mafias everywhere at the main levels of power in both economic and politic areas. Of course, these questions are not sexy and bankable, neither hangable.

© Philippe Bazin, Sans titre, série ‘Faces’, Les Vieillards, 1985-1986

I see an interconnected city, with links, wires, pipes, roads, path, borders, cars, and even some greenery. It is so dense and in same time so empty. It looks like a machine to me, or to refer to your other life as a medical doctor, it looks like a body and I can clearly see the disease. Something goes wrong. None of your pictures can make me at ease. What is that malaise? And how do you succeed in showing uneasiness and absence in the images? These are abstract notions?

PB: Your questions are difficult. How I proceed? I don’t know really. I feel this disease because of my information on the subject. But there is no conscious way to present it in a photo. I feel it. My disposition of mind creates that. I commonly say that there is a blind point in the work of a photographer, something we don’t see, we don’t think, but something we feel, deeply. But this blind point is prepared by experience of the subject, and by all we have done before. Difficult to say better…
What is important with ‘Dans Paris’ is that people feel it goes wrong and that it is impossible to say exactly what goes wrong because it is only in the construction of the image. Maybe I’m not placed where I’m supposed to in order to take the picture or where the public expects me to shoot from?

© Philippe Bazin, Sans titre, série ‘Antichambres’, Pologne, 2008

So Photography is to you a first phase of studying, research, analysis on a subject, its anchorage in arts, its geo-political and historical context, then full of that theoretical knowledge, you go on the field with a pre-determined idea of which picture you wish to make, which type of camera you want to use. How would you describe the second phase? How would you describe the physical act of taking pictures? Like a long march through the desert in search for what has been been so precisely prepared and matured, a quest for the images to complete the project? Like being drawn into a precognitive level of action? Like a fight?

PB: Of course there is a part of studying, researching, analyzing before taking photographs, but that’s not the end of it! After all that, nothing is really prepared. Documentary photographers need to be like sponges, to be ready for what happens and understand what happens. For example, in Poland in 2008 I photographed in 18 Refugee Centers for Asylum Seekers. The first day, in the first center, a refugee came and asked me to photograph his room, with his things hanging on the wall. After that, I photographed many different places, many different subjects, but finally, back in France, I decided to keep only the photographs of the rooms people asked me to photograph. It was such a strong experience in different centers, but all my knowledge before going to Poland was not directly useful. Anyway, if you are full of useless information, you also need to be very careful about what people say and what is your real experience. So,when taking photos one needs to know many things and… to also to forget them and not to think to them every time. Something more intuitive is necessary, but I need to keep calm, cold and to work with the memory of what happened yesterday or the day before. It’s not a fight, I’m not fetishist with cameras nor with people. And I don’t seek for images that I would have imagined before.

© Philippe Bazin, Sans titre, série ‘Les Bourgeois de Calais’, Calais 1994

Then comes the third phase, showing your work. How do you proceed? Which is the right way to make these images count? Publishing, exhibitions, web?

PB: I think that the exhibition as art is a dead concept, it comes from the Universal Exhibitions of the XIXth century, like the Crystal Palace in 1851 in London. We have now to enter into « discussion ». when considering documentary photography the exhibition is not the only way to show the work. The complexity of it is not often reinforced by the process of exhibition. One of the reasons is that we can see in the field of art more and more collective shows, and less single shows. We need dedicated spaces for documentary photography, and a lot of space to develop the purpose of the work. Most of contemporary art is developed in Biennales and art fairs. The galleries are more and more little spaces becauses their existence relies on gaining access to biennales and fairs. There is less and less interest in exhibiting in such little spaces. Another reason is the relationship between the work and the market value. Documentary photography can’t be looked upon as painting, a singular piece of art. Nobody wants to consider a hundred photographs (or more) as one piece of art. Very few people can understand that. And if yes, they consider it is very expensive. Another reason is how photography is considered in the field of art when it has not the evident signs of art in it.

So, sometime my work needs exhibition, as the project ‘Le Musée du silence’, sometimes it cannot exist without a book, as ‘John Brown’s Body’. But anytime, it is possible to have discussions on the work, even with a few people, and actually this is my main activity as an artist. Before the XIXth century, art existed for that, for discussion. It was the situation during the Enlightment period, for example. The concept of exhibition was created to sell goods, machines etc… It immediately changed the situation of art which was included in these Universal Exhibitions. Exactly at the moment when photography appeared…

© Philippe Bazin, Sans titre, série ‘John Brown’s Body’, Lake Placid, 2009

My field is documentary photography, maybe it’s not an art, but from that kind of photography comes the main questions that are addressed to the art field. As you know, the appearance of photography changed the situation of art during the XIXth century. Not only visual arts, but also literature for example. Photography created the possibility to reproduce art. Then art could allow consideration of the medium as a real subject of art that is separated from representation, and finally the question was the end of the cultural dimension of art which was replaced by its technical and medium aspects. Walter Benjamin, and also André Bazin, were very clear with that. But many practices of photographers tried to go back to paintings purposes, which you can see even in photojournalism, or even in the evolution of the Becher’s School. I think real documentary photography refuses that background. So it remains a question for art.

Philippe, to help us understand your work, maybe you can tell us about the artists who had and/or still are influencing  your photography in some way? I know your particular interest for Bruno Serralongue or Allan Sekula…

PB: I think the first influence I received came from Weegee ! I was visiting friends in Berlin in 1980, not interested in photography, but they wanted to visit an exhibition of his work. It was very strange, it was impossible for me to understand what I was looking at ! I was completely astonished.

Coming back to Paris, I entered in a little gallery rue Quincampoix, and discovered an exhibition of Dieter Appelt, very disturbing for me at that time. Wonderful prints, but everywhere the head of a dead man covered by earth. Then, when I began to photograph a few month later, I wanted to have good quality development and printing. I followed a two days workshop with Jean Dieuzaide, and discovered, because of him, Diane Arbus, August Sander, Lewis Hine, the Farm Security Administration mission… These photographers are always great references for me. But sometime, references are also against who you are : for myself I immediatly felt the danger of photojournalism for my art project and was strongly against Henri Cartier-Bresson and his “decisive moment”. Good thing to quickly know what you don’t want to do…

Actually, I’m very interested in Documentary photography, which is exactly opposite to Photojournalism. I received a strong influence from Lewis Baltz, I worked with him as assistant, and from Allan Sekula, but later. I’m very interested in Martha Rosler (I worked on San Diego School recently), and, in France, by Bruno Serralongue and Olivier Ménanteau. In general there is a very good French school of my generation, which is mature now, but mainly unseen, with Jean-Louis Garnell, Jean-Luc Moulène, Patrick Tosani, Patrick Faigenbaum, Florence Chevallier, Yves Trémorin, Marc Pataut, Sophie Ristelhueber, Eric Poitevin, Thibault Cuisset and some others.

© Philippe Bazin, Le Mur II, série Le Musée du silence, Istanbul 2013

To me ‘John Brown’s body’ is the work that summarizes how you mix the  political / literature / visual / conceptual / historical points of view, Can you explain that project and what it leads to?

PB: In 2007, I read “Cloud Splitter” by Russell Banks, my favorite American writer. It’s his main book, his “chef d'oeuvre”, maybe. The book narrates the story of John Brown, an American abolitionist of the nineteenth century. Finally, after years of conferences and writings, he decided to fight with guns against the USA to try to free the slaves. He didn’t succeed and was arrested. The  US Government suggested that he plead insanity but he refused and was hanged in 1859. Thoreau, Emerson, and in France Victor Hugo protested against that, very strongly. After that, the ideas of John Brown remained in the minds of black people in USA, for whom he was, until Malcom X, the main thinker regarding black freedom, but not in the pacifist way. Just after the Banks’s book was published, it was “Eleven one”. The figure of John Brown came back to discuss the question of terrorism and its legitimacy. For example, I participated in 2009 at a seminar on “Was John Brown a terrorist?”. It was at Lake Placid, where John Brown’s grave is situated. This place is now a National Monument. I visited it in summer 2007, then decided to work with local activists interested in Brown’s ideas : against modern slavery, against racism, for soldiers coming back from Iraq and completely lost in their mind, etc… But this happens in a strange region, the North of New York State, very conservative, mainly interested in snow sports (Lake Placid is a city of Olympic Winter Games), by trekking in the mountains. The people like very much the Adirondack’s Style, a decorative style for wood houses, coming from influences of both amerindian and colonial civilization. I wanted to question all those fields together, it was an ambitious project in the manner of documentary photography. What is important in that aesthetic way is the montage, the confrontation of thoughts which are different, sometime opposite : it creates the ruptures, the mental space for reflexion and discussion. The spectator has to think about his own answers by him-herself. This work is a project of a book, but actually, I didn’t succeed in making it. It is seen only on the web.

© Philippe Bazin, Sans titre, série ‘John Brown’s Body’, Lake Placid, 2009

You would like to make us think? How unfair is that!

PB: Yes of course. I know people like to be astonished in front of a piece of art, they like to be taken by emotions, marvellousness, etc… For myself, I believe in intelligence of people, their capacity to think, to develop their possibilities to understand questions, to enter in a kind of dialogue with the artist. I think people can feel emotions in that way, too. Christiane Vollaire calls that « documentary emotions ». It’s not the immediate satisfaction of a desire, which is expected of consumerism, even in the art field. It’s the constuction of a personnal and critical field of thinking for each spectator. But you’re right, how unfair it is!

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LINKS
Philippe Bazin
France