Interview with Bertrand Carrière

• Tweet

Following the footsteps of an unknown World War I photographer, Bertrand Carrière photographed the contemporary landscapes that once were the scene of infamous battles. His resulting photographic series, titled Lieux Mêmes has recently been exhibited at Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto. Although the show has ended, I’m certain this won’t be the last time we’ll be seeing this series. I interviewed Carrière for the occasion, trying to get a sense of its preoccupations and process.

Louis Perreault: Your most recent work, Lieux Mêmes, deals with a subject that you explored in previous projects. The geographic particularities that shaped the most important wars of the twentieth century and the visual landscapes that were altered consequently have been the subject of a body of work that you published in 2006 titled Dieppe. Could you explain how Lieux Mêmes was conceived? Do you see this series as a continuation of the Dieppe project?

Bertrand Carrière: Yes, Lieux Mêmes is, in a way, a continuation of the Dieppe project. I could not imagine embarking on such a project without what I had learned previously. By that I mean that Dieppe was first an installation project which became a series of landscapes. I am still fascinated by these sites of dark memories and by the fabulous northern light of those parts of France. I learned to photograph not only the sites, but also to put structures in perspective, using the land and it’s flatness to construct meaning. I should say that I’m not really fascinated by war itself, although I have become some kind of a history freak, I’m mostly drawn to places that have meaning and history. I try to work in a way in which memory becomes visible and to evoke what is absent in the landscape. In this particular project, I started out wanting to do a documentary film. The more I was working on the film project, the more it became apparent that my attention was shifting away from a film narrative into, or back to, still photographs. The lessons of the Dieppe project, that started out in one form and transformed into a series of landscape images, helped me to stay aware of what was around me and staying open to transformation. Being conscious of that has been a great personal achievement.

Lieux Mêmes started out as a series of scouting photographs for the film. And although I am still attached to those first photographs, I think it was when I started to look freely at the landscapes, taking distances from the original album of old photographs I was working from, that the real project started to take shape.

LP: I know it was the result of many trips to the regions you photographed. How long did you work on this project?

BC: A little more than 4 years. It started in 2005 when I wrote the first lines of this project. We are now in 2009 and I just finished the prints.

LP: Considering the time lapse that separate the different trips, do you see those as having been creatively important?  Did they bring any significant reflections?  Did they allow or provoke any changes in your approach?

BC: Absolutely. They gave me time to think about the photographs, to structure them in series and to construct a body of work. It also enabled me to understand how I was visually reacting to the landscape, by using the flatness of the land. It enabled me to plan out my trips, to go back to places I already visited in different seasons, and to see them in a different light.

I should also tell you, I was traveling with a friend, Guth Desprez, a French historian and storyteller who knows all of these areas in the valley of the Somme and the Pas-de-Calais in France like the back of his hand. He was a terrific guide and teacher in the field. So from his maps and information, also using an album of photographs from the 1st World War, we were able to plan out each trip quite carefully. So each time I knew I was going back, my sense of what I wanted to photograph became clearer. I also had the opportunity to visit some sites on different occasions, in different seasons and different light situations. So, my sense of what I was photographing and how I was making he pictures was broader than the results of a first encounter.

Finally, I showed my photographs to some colleagues who helped verbalize and organize my project. They were a great help. I think it’s very important to have other eyes look at the work differently, help with the editing, to point out what is there and what is simply obvious. I mean that working with such subject matter, sometimes I became a little too involved with the subject matter and not enough with the kind of tone the project should have.

LP: Chemin de cendre, a video installation presented last summer at Galerie Simon Blais, in Montreal, brought a personal dimension to the project, as we followed your journey through the landscape that once were the scenes of great battles.  It put your own experience at the forefront of the project and positioned your work at the frontier of documentary and art photography (if such differentiation exist).  Do you consider Lieux Mêmes as a documentary project? Is it important for you that this personal dimension be recognized by the viewer?

BC: Because this project started out as a film project, a documentary film, the road traveled throughout the project was important to me. I wanted that film to have a travelogue tone. So it became a real part of the video installation.

I do consider Lieux Mêmes to be a documentary project. It’s what I do, it’s part of me. But, I surely did not want the photographs to be a byproduct of the film. I had to work in a very different way. I guess my work is more lyrical when I photograph. There is no story line. And that’s what I like about photography, no before or after, just the present.

But you are right, putting myself as an actor of the work, making my presence clear is an important part of my working strategy.

LP: The landscapes you photographed, aside from having been the scenes of tragedies, are sites of contemporary life where people live, build and transform their history on a day-to-day basis. Rarely, in the photographs of Lieux Mêmes, do we encounter a human presence. I guess this was a deliberate choice on your part. How would you explain this decision?

BC: As much as the photographs are empty of any human presence, as much the film was supposed to be filled with characters. I guess I was struck by the quietness and the emptiness of the places and small towns. Few people actually visit these places and when they do, they come as tourists, by bus, visiting as history students or pilgrims. That was one thing I was not interested in photographing. I was visually involved with the land, and the light, trying to find meaning in that emptiness and flatness.

LP: Is there anything that you feel you did not explore in this project, something that might be the source for future research?

BC: I think I’m still too close to it. But the exhibitions ahead will permit me to explore different aspects of the work, showing the scouting photographs, for instance, or another series of portraits that I photographed on tombstones, in black and white.

Because this series of two projects (Dieppe and Lieux Mêmes) deals with the wars that reshaped Europe in the early part of the last century, I would like to make a third installment looking at contemporary Europe, in the former Yugoslavia. I would like to close the subject in that matter. But starting a whole new project and embarking on another few years of work on such a dark subject is a little hard to think about right now.

And then, there is the book form of Lieux Mêmes project. I’m still waiting for that part to happen. Soon I hope.

LP: Browsing through your web site, one is encountering a relatively large and diversified portfolio. While working on Lieux mêmes, if I am not mistaken, you were also producing work that was of a different nature. Ici (2007) presents images that speak about a world of proximity, an intimacy that you translate through images of objects, scenes and artifacts of daily life. In a way, it is very much in continuity with projects such as Signes de jour (2001), where your own personal world appeared to be the basis and the drive for creation.

How important is it for you to keep a production that is diversified? Do you see the different approaches (if you think they are any different) that you take as being complementary? How do you see this diversity, what role does it play in your creative process?

BC: I think some photographers do the same photographs all the time and they get very good at it. I would get bored. I need the change, the diversity. I work with different cameras, on different projects at the same time, going from black and white to color, from film to digital.  And because of the two projects dealing with large historical subjects, far away (Dieppe and Lieux mêmes), I get the urge to work on more personal matters, closer to home. But it isn’t any easier.

I guess all of that also comes from a commercial background where I was always trying to get more personal with the commercial work. By letting the lessons of commercial work feed into my personal work, I hoped it could become one body of photographs. Nowadays, commercial work has transformed into commissioned work. And I do like to experiment once in a while, using different materials, pushing in new directions my way of photographing, looking and working.

Every project has it’s own specificities and I try to solve the problems it throws at me. In that way, all my projects nourish one another and really do become complementary. I celebrate that as long as it permits me to stay true to my vision.

— by Louis Perreault on November 23, 2009. Filed under Interview