The sky, the moor, the trees, the water, the sand, the snow; all of it seems so artificial. Nobody really sees the world this way: it is the process applied – the luminous sweep of a flashlight over a long exposure – that registers on the film, producing what we see here….by manipulating the appearance of the real, by producing colours and densities beyond common experience…the visible is relieved of its documentary weight.
p.57
These images are not intended to suspend time; they are images of a world without duration that seems to refer only to itself. They are images made of the movements of light, of a kind of hypnotic eternity that time seems to have abandoned near the great expanses of the north, the ice, the limit of the horizon.
p.70
Contrary to what we often think, photography is not capturing the appearance of the moment, rather it is a means of proposing to reality an image of itself, however whimsical, so that it might appear more real to us. Photography is a means of naming reality. However, unlike language, which is a system of metaphors, photography does not displace or transport anything; it does not propose a system of equivalents to the real.
p.15
Is the sensation of discovering reality in a photograph related to the simple fact that the only reality activated in the image is our own reality? It is our memory of reality that confers upon the image its reality and this memory of reality is also a memory of ourselves.
p.41
Copyright © Jean -Paul Curnier 2004