Considering a photograph as a work of art is meaningful, in my opinion, only in a relative way. Our task is to record events. Whether or not it is art depends on each person’s interpretation.
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Photography, like life, is a journey we undertake in order to discover something. To reproduce something is to tell a story. We tell stories in our own way. The story isn’t important. What matters is how it’s told. I make images with my fingertip, with the collaboration and complicity of my eyes. Telling stories with a fingertip isn’t always easy, I must say.
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Photographing is a painful commitment. Painful because in order for the photo to “be,” it must be real. Painful because this commitment must tend toward the renewal of something in the world. Whatever it may be — or who knows what?
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It is essential for me that photography be rooted in the moment, that it insinuate itself there, that it reveal a vision of the world, the synthesis of its mystery, of its objects and its things. It attains grandeur only when it is capable of translating the authenticity of its transitory elements.
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As in any art, the charge of intuition and vocation is the decisive element in arriving at an efficient and singular language that is at once personal and universal. This, as I see it, is the whole problem of communicability.
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The photographer must have in him a vital amalgam of acquired experiences. Living experiences that gather and fuse together, in a fraction of a second, to make a photo. Experience does not create energy, but polarizes it better, perhaps, over time.
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A photo is the alloy of an imaginary world and an existent, codified world. One must be in place and assume ridiculous bodily positions. From time to time, the world becomes too big, too morose, too cold. Sometimes the imagination no longer has the force to offer its input. One must be present, must participate. The photographic method must be ludic. One must play photography. I take photographs as I play music. I get to it. My instrument is a 50mm, which is to say my eye.
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I work at the Louvre. Sometimes it is banal. That’s normal: I imagine miners who descend every day into the mine… It’s the same thing. Each day, I buy a metro ticket to go there, to come back. I always tell myself, I’m going to do something original. The photo must recount something. Mallarmé said, in essence: “The ‘unspoken’ becomes more eloquent than all else; the ‘unspoken’ becomes emotion.”
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Chance is certainly not manifested by me; it is the other. I circulate, wander, chance is perfectly elsewhere, it is everywhere. Too restless, I am by nature incapable of staying in one place, of sticking geographically to one spot. I am, in space, itinerant, unstable. Grace need only intervene at one moment or another, without warning. But when it does an inhuman concentration is necessary, one that has more to do with a storm in the tropics, with rage.
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In the street, in the streets, Leica in hand, I feel like dancing. People aren’t aware of my arrival. I must call forth the dance. People always want to dance a little bit. They are there as though to allow me to give rhythm to my own dance. I mean to say the whole body is present. The feet are very important: they must place themselves well, must choose their territory. The whole body chooses the angle from which the eye looks. This is what I call the counterdance.
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Taking a photograph requires a physical effort, which is dance. It is a search; one must be very concentrated or else one will miss it. Things come from above. It’s always a mystery. Why do certain things occur only to some? If I spend a week walking with a writer, he will write things I didn’t even see. The emotive, psychic, mental mechanism of thought is different. A photo is like a poem. It is given to you. Something happens, something ephemeral. One must be in synchrony with what is happening. There are things, photos I don’t feel like I took.
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Everything that is most important happens by chance around us; it is enough to be able to see it.
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The image often reveals the secret of the gaze, certain uncertainties of the heart.
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There is nostalgia, a nostalgia that carries in it the aspiration to a happy world… As though there were a before, a state preceding society’s deficiencies. The feeling of a lack is like a call to fulfill it, to appease anxiety.
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Photography has a connection to the ephemeral and the nostalgia of losing it. We feel the profound necessity that a transitory thing remain, which is deep down an aspiration to the eternal.
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My photos are abandoned children, barely brought into the world. I never have in mind the photo I will take, and consequently I cannot have in mind the photos I’ve taken! My memory doesn’t try to understand. It is forgetfulness. My photos are a series of images that can give me the real temperature of the world in which I live.
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Photography records, it shows the world, it does not change it. I don’t believe art changes the world. It just has its meaning and its desire.
Translated by Daniel Levin Becker.