Parution en 2001 d'une monographie “Philippe Gronon"dirigée par Jean François Taddei, coproduite par :

Le Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou,
Le 19, Centre Régional d'Art Contemporain, Montbéliard,
Le Frac Franche-Comté, Dole.

interview with Philippe Gronon

Jean-Marc Réol

jmr
The last ten years or so have seen photography become increasingly prominent on the contemporary art scene. You started out in 1987-88, which means that your work has developed in parallel to this blossoming, while maintaining a formal and intellectual coherence that makes no concessions to changing fashions. It would seem that this constancy is based in your very attentive approach to objects, but also in your ideas about the history of the medium. Perhaps you could respond to this statement with a few introductory words about yourself.

PhG
My photographic activity, or rather, my initial choice, as an artist, of the photographic medium, was indeed founded on a certain kind of gaze, heightened by an early awareness that some things are unusually freighted with meaning, because they synthesise or are symbolic of the universe in which they exist. These things are generally very discreet even though they are plain to see. In fact they are almost invisible, quite simply because, even if they are unconsciously perceived, they are never consciously registered. My work therefore consists in drawing attention to what I describe as “targets”, which are the subject of my photographic work. To put it differently, these “target objects” that I reveal are reproduced and revealed with all their signifying value by photography, which I use with all its rigour as a means of recording.

It is perhaps in this sense that my practice could be referred back to figures in the early history of photography. I am thinking of people as important and as well known as Daguerre and Nadar or Cameron, Hill and Atget, people who experimented with the medium at the same time as they offered new images of the world, as they questioned them through this medium, and as they questioned this medium through them. As we speak, in fact, an image by Fox Talbot has come into my mind, that photo he took of a part of bookshelf – a frontal view, very stark and stripped of anecdote: totally modern in its conception. These photographers’ extreme concentration on the technical and experimental aspect of their medium has given us these striking images that seem so close to us in their meticulous fidelity to the model, and yet so far in their fragile and evanescent materiality as silver prints.

jmr
Can the use of a studio camera for most of the series that you are presenting be considered in this respect as a “technical quotation” of this primitive photography?

PhG
I am not concerned to celebrate a technique because it is old but, rather, to adjust a photographic device to the objects I have before me. If I needed to take snapshots in order to capture a movement, then obviously I would use a different technical method! Taking photographs using a studio camera is not a nostalgic return to the past, or historicist self-indulgence; it means accepting a number of parameters which endow photographic mediation with a particular material consistency. The very ponderousness of the machine shapes one’s relation to looking, to time and to light. This becomes more reflexive, more mental, less directly subjective, less dependent on the “decisive moment” of release than with a lighter camera. This brings us back to Walter Benjamin’s reflections. His description of the specific space of photography as “the absolute continuum from brightest light to darkest shadow” refers us back to the early photography I mentioned a moment ago. It is this space that the studio camera renders with the greatest exactitude, and it is in the black-and-white recording of this space that we can perceive the auratic dimension of photography, which Benjamin defined as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be”. It is in the field of this famous enigma that I have, with all due modesty, done this work.

jmr
In the light of what you have said, would it be possible to sketch out a family tree of artists to which you might attach yourself?

PhG
To speak of artists closer in time who have stimulated my ideas, I would spontaneously mention the Land Artists and, on the other side, the Bechers.

jmr
Those are such contrasting propositions!

PhG
True. Smithson and De Maria, for example, were primarily concerned to record an aspect of their intervention in the landscape at a given moment, whereas the Bechers are out to reveal the sculptural qualities of industrial buildings. But both have recorded the traces of things that were destined to decay and disappear. Whether they are the result of an artistic intention or bear witness to an economic activity, they will endure only in photographic form. They will take their place in the history of art only as photographs. I could also make a quick mention, among others, of Struth, Ruff and Gursky in German photography and Tosani and Poitevin in France. All are artists who immobilise objects (as we speak, I am remembering a pile of clothes by Tosani and a starry sky by Ruff), that is to say, artists who present us with objects, landscapes and faces that belong to the banality of the everyday but acquire an unusual intensity.

jmr
In your case, a retrospective look at your practice shows you to be a photographer of things more than of people. But these objects you photograph seem to have been chosen according to particular criteria that are a long way from the decorative world of possible “still-lifes.”

PhG
All the objects that I photograph have a use value. Some of them are very elementary, others highly sophisticated, but all of them are marked by utility. I can now see – because this was not some intention I started out with but the result of an empirical quest – that you could, roughly speaking, list them in terms of activities such as observing, representing, memorising and stocking. That would give you an inventory that would be less heterogeneous than it seems, containing: portholes, observatory domes, photographic plaques, radiography frames, lecture hall blackboards, writing desks, various filing systems and safes. The only pieces not covered by this list are the photos of the engines of the Ariane rocket and the recent heaps of manure.
To get back to your question, I would say that these objects are always presented devoid of context, framed very frontally so that they fill the entire surface of the image, and offered up to the gaze in all their objective nudity. This objectiveness is heightened at the printing stage by the choice of a scale identical to that of the model, and by the care taken over the quality of the definition, in order to reduce the scope for subjective interpretation and intensify the presence of the object in the image. However, in a tangential way, the users, the people who handled these objects, are also present in the photos through the traces of wear, the marks, scratches and stains – a whole index of uses whose enigmatic script can be picked out if you look attentively. This aspect is especially evident in the writing desks from the Vatican library and the blackboards from Sciences Po and the Sorbonne, on which residual fragments of writing appear. So, my studies are not about people, but people are, I repeat, indicially present in a whole area of my work, through the traces that their activity has left on the photographed objects.

jmr
These clues are sometimes totally absent from some of the series you mentioned.

PhG
Yes, I did record colder, more muted images of new objects (the Ariane engines, certain safes, the X-ray frames). The coldness of these objects, their hi-tech appearance, embody a certain idea of radical modernity that contrasts with the memorial quality of the series I described earlier, with their patina of time and history. These two types of image coexist in my work without any corresponding changes in the framing and shooting. With the same frontal objectivity, the same documentary straightforwardness, the same absence of contextual anecdote. In fact it seems to me that the added objectivity that emanates from the objects without any trace of use inspires a more pure and more radical questioning of photography as a medium. In the extreme case of one of the last series showing frames used in a prototype digital X-ray machine, the object is particularly arid: a frame with a carbon fibre screen that tells us very little about the way it works as a surface for recording the body, as a principle of medical investigation. What the eye perceives in this silent matrix of future images of organs, is a kind of image of the phenomenon of vision: all the possibilities of seeing are contained in the dark screen with its abstract geometrical design that we see in the image.

jmr
I would now like to ask you about how your photography relates to painting. The relations are manifest, and even punningly hinted at in the series of “tableaux” (stock exchange boards, blackboards) and writing desks. But it seems to me that the relation is not just playful, and that it is subtly present in nearly every series.

PhG
For the “tableaux” I chose objects that function within a system for the transmission of information or knowledge. What interested me was the idea of photographing surfaces for recording and communicating, of fixing the images of that activity at the intermediary phases when one can see both the action of erasure and a few residual traces of writing.

This idea is taken to extreme lengths in the recent series showing images of lithographic stones at the Imprimerie Nationale, where we see only the smoothed stone ready to receive an image – a mute surface. The grain of the stone is barely visible (it interacts, if I can say this, with the grain of the photo, tone on tone), and one can just make out a few irregularities belonging to the physical structure of the mineral.

There, as for the radiography frames I mentioned earlier, but with a more old-fashioned support, we attain an almost monochrome abstraction – to answer your question in the vocabulary of painting. If we continue with the same line of thought, I am aware that, looking back over my work, it could also be interpreted as an enquiry into painting, especially abstract painting. One would then distinguish the more gestural and lyrical phases from other, more austere, more minimalist and mental ones. This interpretation of “painterly” references in my photographs could in effect accompany the different series, from the first “blackboards” of 1987 to the recent “radiography frames”.

Even if comparisons between painting and photography are among the commonplaces of criticism, I am quite happy to accept this interplay of practices, with one reflecting on another, as an incidental cultural component of what I do. I like the idea that the work of scrutiny that I am doing using with the utmost rigour the objective power of the camera can lead to a meditation on the modern phase of a prestigious old medium like painting! However, in reality all I have done is capture ephemeral situations, as in the series on erased boards, or presented to vision the accumulation of time in the form of signs, as in the desks, or focused on matrices that are devoid of images, like the X-ray plates and the lithographic stones. What photography reveals in these different recordings is also our tendency to see things with the eye of our culture, just as Leonardo da Vinci saw images of clouds in patches of mould on a wall.

The main challenge for me is, by means of a photographic protocol defined by extremely precise criteria of scale, format, distance, light and immobility, to produce an open image, in the 1970s sense of the “open work”, an image which enables the spectator’s perception to crystallise a plurality of levels of meaning on a single object.

jmr
Speaking of which, a moment ago you spoke of “targets” when referring to the objects you photograph. Could you tell me a little more about the attitude implied by this term and the degree to which it conditions your work?

PhG
I use the term “target” to convey the extreme attention – like that of a marksman – with which I look at the objects that will become images in my photographs. This shooting metaphor is very expressive for me because it implies a sequence of several acts: choosing, isolating, aiming. Choosing an object is, firstly, picking it out from the multitude of things that make up our reality because it has particular characteristics, because it is, as I was saying at the beginning of our conversation, emblematic of a significant domain of human activity, while at the same time its banality makes it almost invisible. My work consists in endowing it, as an image, with a significant autonomy, by representing it totally out of context. All this is based on the work of seeing that, with the years, I have realised functions in two opposite and complementary modes: an active, projective mode, that of the a priori idea; and a passive mode, that of the openness of seeing.
For example, the engines of the Ariane rocket. I had formed a mental idea of the image and then I went to look at the object and see how the image matched up with reality. Whereas I “saw” the lithographic stones, in all their immediacy, when I paid a recent visit to the Imprimerie Nationale. I was there to photograph the “trolleys” series. This work of seeing is thus founded on a conceptual and projective coherence and a passive receptiveness, a permanent permeability.

jmr
We could now go from these last examples to the four recent series presented in the exhibition. Could you say in what context each one was conceived?

PhG
Let’s begin with Le Paradis perdu, which is an important piece for me because it grows out of the conceptual work I began with the photos of index systems (Vatican Library, French National Assembly). The piece takes the form of eight images, taken at the Imprimerie Nationale, which are frontal views of trolleys containing typographic frames, the lead “forms” that were used to print the translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost. This book, which was written in the seventeenth century, in the middle of Cromwell’s Puritan revolution, is an important event in cultural history, not only because it gave literary, epic and visionary form to the Biblical episode of the temptation and fall of humanity, but also because it was a “cult” book for the Romantics in the 19th century, a source of inspiration for artists, and particularly the English Symbolist painters. The eight images representing the book as it is held by these trolleys thus comprise one single piece, based on the same principle I used in 1994/95 when I made five photographs covering all the incunabuli in the Vatican Library during my stay at the Villa Medici.
For Le Paradis perdu, the very conceptual piece of work conjuring up this book has a commemorative and almost archaeological aspect inasmuch as lead printing has almost totally disappeared, having been replaced by contemporary printing technologies.

jmr
Could this be taken to indicate a nostalgic twist in the habitual rigour of your working method?

PhG
No more than the Bechers’ photographs of mine-head frames. The frontal and very bare appearance of the photographs only shows the sides of the forms the trolley shelves. The geometry is sufficiently abstract to discourage any leaning towards sentiment or anecdote.
For the lithographic stones, which I spotted, as I’ve already said, when I was doing the photographs of trolleys, these photos are even more “abstract”, insofar as they are quite devoid of traces of images and all you can see on the surface are a few fine accidental effects inherent in the material’s natural structure. To radicalise their presentation even more, the cropped photos were put against a computer-generated ground and then printed on chalk overlay. In fact, the grey margin that compensates for the irregularities in their outline in the final image is a materialisation of the virtual ground on which I inscribed them.
What interested me in these images was their apparent perfection, their neutrality and, at the same time, the tiny difference that, when you looked closely, made each one unique. You know that in lithographers’ jargon they call these surfaces “skins” and that they are rubbed smooth and recover their pristine appearance after each printing, while at the same time being rich with all the images which they helped to generate. It is, in a sense, this power to record that I have tried to capture in the very muteness of these abstract surfaces, while retaining for the attentive observer the barely perceptible singularities of each stone.
The digital radiography frames that I mentioned earlier are of a piece with the “photography frames” with which I started this body of work in 1987/88. These digital frames are part of a radiographic technology that is still at the prototype stage. They are screens measuring 45 x 45 cm for the reception of X-ray images – internal images of the body, therefore, which will be digitised by a computer and then translated into pixels. The only things that will appear on this matrix are images produced by a digital system, in other words, images that are as abstract as you can get. What interests me here is, in spite of the technological gap, the closeness to the lithographic stones. They are both surfaces for recording images that will appear and reappear with and after use, two neutral moulds in a system for producing images.

jmr
What the photograph shows comes fairly close to the idea of a conceptual or minimalist piece.

PhG
It is clear that the image could refer us to a form of radical geometrical abstraction. But we shouldn’t overemphasise these analogies or judge these photographs in terms of an overly exhaustive comparison with painting. What is important, I repeat, is the stratification of levels of meaning that compose such an image. Recollections of a certain form of painting certainly play a role here because they are part of our cultural memory and we always enjoy finding new comparisons to make with our imaginary museum. But there is also the quality of the object itself that is the target of the photography, what it synthesises technically, intellectually and in the imagination as an instrument of representation.

jmr
About the complexity of meaning that you have mentioned, can we come back for a moment to the memorial dimension present in these recording surfaces that are the lithographic stones and the digital frames. In this sense, the stones strike me as more directly metaphorical: you erase something in order to record just as we forget in order to remember.

PhG
Yes, the stone goes further in that direction. The digital plate is used above all to transcode information. It is also amusing to think that the lithographic stone, a Quaternary limestone which was chosen for specific mechanical and physical qualities, is one of the oldest means of reproducing images. Taking the analogy further, we could also mention the idea that the first support for painted images was the tufa surface of prehistoric caves! These are all analogue or logical thoughts about time, history, means of representation, supports, traces, etc…. that may come to mind when looking at these images and that enrich the way we respond to them.
I now come to the latest series, the “piles of manure”, which perhaps mark a turning point in my work. There are some fifteen photographs taken in the outskirts of Paris, near Rambouillet and Fontainebleau, a horse-rearing region. They show piles of manure in the foreground of an essentially rural landscape.
jmr
The immediate impression given by these “landscapes” puts me in mind – forgive this historian’s way of thinking – of the atmosphere in Romantic paintings. These piles of dung exuding misty vapour… You must surely have been aware of that when you took the photo…

PhG
These photos were not taken in a spirit of evocation, which would have turned into a pastiche or parody of Romantic painting. I was thinking more of Hamish Fulton than of Caspar David Friedrich! Here too, the work is the result of a walk.

jmr
Still what you see, as in certain paintings, is a series of horizons – the mound of the heap itself, the plain or woods in the background which give these “images” a “picturesque” depth.

PhG
For me the heap of manure is above all a living form in the landscape whose main characteristic is that it is ephemeral, since it is destined to be spread and incorporated into the soil. As such, this pile represents a moment in the process of transformation whose ephemeral presence, once again, will have been captured by the photo. What also interests me is to think that his heap of excrement and straw has an essential nourishing value which endows it with a living nobility, plus a more conceptual and universal value which speaks of the cyclical nature of living organisms. “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”, said Lavoisier. This all speaks to us of organic transformation, but the photo immobilises a moment of this transformation which resembles a landscape.

jmr
This “heap of dung” also departs from the rule of identical scale which you applied to your photographs of objects. Is that one factor contributing to what, a moment ago, you were saying made it a possible turning point in your work?

PhG
When I took on representations of the landscape, I was obliged to redefine certain aspects of my habitual photographic protocol. Indeed, every panoramic representation defines the landscape from a particular point of view. The gaze does not come up against a single object but encounters a depth punctuated by visual events (plants, contrasts in the terrain) reaching to the horizon, which opens onto a sky. That old question, which originally belonged to the history of painting, was answered in the Renaissance by the invention of perspective, whose code imposes a hierarchy of objects and thereby suggests depth. This question happens to be raised again in these photos. The chaotic and ephemeral forms of the heaps have an intrinsic power as landscape which repeats and dominates the more neutral scenery around them.
You will also note that, in order to evoke the idea of a window opening onto these “landscapes”, I chose, for the first time, to present these photos in a frame that was relatively large in relation to the modest format of the image itself.

jmr
In spite of these changes, you have remained faithful for the time being to black-and-white, whereas most of the photographs shown in the field of contemporary art are in colour. Is this a deliberate aesthetic choice?

PhG
For me, choosing black-and-white means choosing a specifically photographic code, an abstract convention for representing reality. In this sense I consider colour as interference, a false realism that is all too often seductive and facile. Black-and-white is not old-fashioned. Indeed, you will note that I readily make use of the most contemporary techniques, including digital ones, without this affecting the two-colour basis. Black-and-white, I insist, is for me the cipher of photographic abstraction. It is first and foremost a conceptual choice but it is also the photographic mode that is best able to visually translate the play of light on objects. I am thus sticking as closely as possible to the etymological significance of the term: to take a photograph is always to write with light.

Paris, April 2001