Miroir
Using the camera to sketch the mystery of a location.
Paris 1984 (excerpt)
Text by Annie Cohen, published in the Chartreuse de Villeneuve-Lez-Avignon exhibition catalogue:
Here, each picture questions photography.
Each picture threatens the art of photography.
Here, the debate is theoretical - radical and theoretical.
Which picture must one take?
Genève Cotté’s art hides more than it reveals.
Photography saying ‘no’ to photography.
A painful and solemn denial.
The body surrenders itself without complacency to time, the moment of a snap-shot.
The processing of the shot blends with that of the body between the expert hands of the beautician.Esthetics considered as truth. Pristine. Focused.Photography, freed from vital necessity, becomes the unquestionable evidence of triumph over
photography.
Could it be a triumph over death?
We get to a picture expressing the unnamable, the image of a body conveying its own negative. The staging of an essential darkness, the deeds of death recorded on film. A prayer like trance. Light. Rays of sunlight illuminate the body, as if in an attempt to penetrate the secret space of its fantasies.
The body unwinds darkness like film spool. And the image of the naked body conveys the image, unique,a summary of photography, the image of photography as an art.
Here, one does not take a photo.
One takes the photo.
The body maintains that which the picture conveys. Complex dialectics of an eye capturing the
invisible.
Annie Cohen
http://www.m-e-l.fr/annie-cohen,ec,760