Le voyageur incertain
The city is a matrix that cannot be apprehended in its entirety at once. You cannot visit more than one place at a time. Circumventing this limitation, the French architect and photographer Jérémie Dru found a way to perceive the city – in his case Paris, his hometown – from more than just one point of view. He freezes the city’s moments and overlays them. By that, Dru puts the observer between two places and into a dimension where time and space seem to have no meaning at all.
The city reveals itself in successive stages and in fragments. In his book L'ombre de la ville: essai sur la photographie contemporaine, the French communications research specialist Alain Mons points to the cognitive consequences this has for the observer: “The urban real can only be apprehended by successive touches, it is necessary to be patiently impregnated by its dimensions because it is peculiar to reality to give itself by profiles, little by little, thanks to a temporal penetration.” It is up to the traveller to multiply the views and experiences in order to understand the city in depth and comprehensively: to pass through the axes which traverse it, to discern the blocks and the architecture which composes them, to be attentive to the urban details that tell the city’s story, and to be open to the experiments that arise from these configurations.
As a photographer, I practice with the intuition that there are elusive realities intrinsic to the city. One of the oldest conceptions of the city, one by which civilization has sought to explain itself to itself, is to see it as a reduction of the cosmos to the human scale. Thus, I explore the urban space in search of those faces that are imperceptible to our eyes, as did the artists of surrealism or the New Vision in the early twentieth century. They considered the analogue camera as a way to perfect and complete our eyes. In his book Peinture, photographie, film et autres écrits sur la photographie, László Moholy-Nagy says: “The camera leads us to truths that we cannot see with our eyes, which cannot be observed and become visible with the camera.” Photography, in other words, gives us access to truths that cannot be perceived relying on the perceptual apparatus of the human body alone.
These considerations are not unlike the theories of general relativity which were born at the same time. Even Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow demonstrate in The Grand Design that “the laws that underlie the universe are not all perceptible by our senses, our perception is constructed through the lens that is the structure of interpretation of our brain.” It is difficult to imagine that time (and consequently space) is a material which can expand or contract under the influence of gravity, or even twist itself. For us, time is linear. It is like a straight line that runs, immutable, without ever turning.
The camera stops the race of time. It makes it possible to freeze a moment of longer or shorter duration on film, in the manner of a memory. The photograph shows pieces of the city that we perceived in a certain state, at a certain moment, as we progressed with our work. Using the double exposure for my photo series “Le voyageur incertain/The uncertain traveller”, which consists of photographing several times on the same negative, I try to testify to the different states of the city of Paris, to see them simultaneously. These “pieces” are overprinted on the same plane. The axes and buildings, usually separated in space and time, are thus linked by the steps of the traveller. They coexist within the same image, in ways similar to how they coexist in the subconscious of the person who has passed through them. As one discovers the city, certain places trigger mental images in the walker, which are sent back to impressions or to other places. It is this state of being between two places that I seek to evoke through photography. Places take on the same material quality as light, and “melt on top of each other”, so to speak. They enter into a resonance, and begin a dialogue. A pole becomes a tree, a street turns into a railway line running in a below-ground cut. Street signs, illuminated logos or silhouettes appear on the photograph, like reminiscences, fleeting pointers, catchy signals; and become clues to the places travelled to. Recomposed, fused, superimposed, the fragments form a singular and dreamlike city. One that seems to be drawn from a dream, for the constitution of the place displays its own logic and coherence.
My approach consists not only in overprinting two images, but in confusing the lines and vanishing points that compose them. The two images become inseparable from one another, and they are governed by one perspective. In this way, the architecture of the place is transformed. By folding architectural lines on themselves, they recompose urban spaces-times with multiple properties, sometimes paradoxical. A ceiling can be the sky, the mineral can also be vegetal. The architecture of the places deceives the traveller, and the city takes on aspects of a labyrinth. Photography makes it possible to build worlds on the border between fiction and reality. It shows the hidden complexity of the world and the cosmos, inscribed in the city and in architecture.
