What are images meant for? I hear a lot of chattering around photography. It's dead!? It's alive?! Functional definitions for single determinations are proliferating. It is a general buzz that seems to blow oxygen over the fire of knowledge. Yet, as an observer, I must recognize that all this speculation extinguishes the flame in the bud. Perhaps it would be enough to recognize that photography is a means of representing the visible and, therefore, a representation more or less participated by those who make it. A bit like in a tragedy, in which a need for understanding is staged, in photography it is possible to trace a transcendent will, to measure an intentional gap, a variation on the theme, a split from a prevailing apology, a deviation from the signifier. For example, in some photographic constructs by Guillaume Pallat, which are hereby introduced to support my argument, I can distinguish useful "brain holds" to further deduce the role of technology in western thought.

In the first stasimon of Sophocles' tragedy "Antigone" the choir says: there are many things but none is on par with Men. Unlike other living beings, having no instincts, Men must make up for his natural deficit through "techne". Today we can say without awe that technique is something ontological rather than instrumental to Men. Men are technical by necessity rather than by virtue. However, as we have now learned to recognize from the macroscopic damage of nuclear weapons up to the thinnest nano-cellular pollutions that poison the earth, the technique gives Men a boundless power in which lies the danger. A possibility of trespassing beyond own limits that in the past would have attracted the wrath of the gods. However, the latter no longer frighten us, since "God no longer makes history" and we have become victims of our blind hopes, to quote the words of Prometheus. Thus, we have overturned our relationship with nature which is no longer an unchanging background against which to measure our actions. As shown by Pallat, we are left with the ruins of a sociological removal, made up of statues composed of plastic polymers synthesized in industrial chemical plants, surreal extras, inanimate puppets that populate an anthropized and decidedly paranoid scenario.

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Urban Safari'

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Urban Safari'

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Urban Safari'

People are increasingly turning around themselves, doomed to rotate in a carousel of resignation where they can pretend to be still protagonists among fairy-tale dioramas and chivalrous costumes. A contrast leading back to the ancient conflict between primordial desire and the "The Will to Power" (Wille zur Macht, Nietzsche, 1901) and well expressed in the voluptuous orgies and nostalgic recall of a lost paradise staged by Pallat within commercial buildings and environments. Of that Eden, of that garden symbol of the eternal myth of the womb of life, enclosure of love and divine generosity. The focus of the prospect, however, ends against the Cartesian massacre, against the solid neo-liberal geometries, the catechism of advertising signs and petrol prices. As if to remind us that our body is no longer exhausted in a sacred natural horizon, but has embodied the technological prostheses. As in David Cronemberg's Crash film in which the erotic drive comes to embrace road accidents.

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Eden'

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Eden'

In Pallat, too, the dystopian outcome of techno-capitalism rules. The human face is lost, becomes almost insignificant, disappears in the amorphous and depressive background of urban civilization which lowers each individual to the degree of ethical impersonality and bodily immateriality. It produces what Martin Heidegger calls "Einenung" or a standard leveling, a neutralization of every probability of being. The portraits of passers-by, staged again by Pallat as puppets of an announced and manipulated tragedy, are amorphous, elusive, faceless and therefore devoid of critical conscience. 

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Les Passant'

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Les Passant'

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Les Passant'

Lonely atoms sailing lost in the metropolitan desert. As actors who act condescendingly in the script, the docile workers portrayed by the French photographer during their lunch-break appear as "prisoners", sentenced to prepackaged meal and carbonated drinks, to a "voluntary servitude" (Étienne de La Boétie), which prevents them from seeing the bars of their production cage. 

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Pause déjeuner'

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Pause déjeuner'

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'Pause déjeuner'

On the other hand, the threat of ending up on the margins is high. Better to be indebted than poor. A person who has no debts does not serve in a market-driven society that announces compulsory consumption as a religious practice. The risk is to find oneself among the barracks, among the last who will never be the first. Among those who are no longer allowed to have secondary needs. To those who have slipped so low that they have been expelled from the economy, from statistics, and from any chance of social emancipation. Among those miserable who dress and feed on the scraps of mass conformism.

© Guillaume Pallat from the series 'By My Slum'

I found traces of this malaise and much more among Pallat's images. And these are just some considerations to start from ...

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LINKS
Guillaume Pallat
Urbanautica France