Fonce Alphonse (1993) represents one of the most intimate, and at the same time, coded events in the life of a couple, marriage. For the occasion, my fiancée and I intentionally exceeded the speed limit on our wedding day, in order to have the Police take our wedding portrait.
In some respects, judicial photography is the most appropriate approximation possible of what one could call photographic “objectivity” in that it has a legal status, an official document calling forth all the power of the judicial institution to procure its authenticity.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Alphonse Bertillon understood perfectly well that this authority depended on the systematization of judicial photography. The desired result of these procedures - standardizating the picture-taking apparatus and photographic practices, codifying and quantifying the body, combining images, measurements and formalized descriptive texts - was to reduce and reorient the polysemic potential of the photographic image, to produce certainty.
With Fonce Alphonse, at the exact moment the police use this apparatus to try to identify us, our identities are in flux, marriage bringing about a change of name, social and civil status, nationality…
Exhibitions
- The Spaces of the Image, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Maison de la culture Frontenac, Montreal, Canada, 2009
- Deux Temps, Trois Mouvements, l’Espace Hermine, Plouha, France, 2009
- Anxious Omniscience: Surveillance in Contemporary Cultural Practice, The Art Museum, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, 2002
- Rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ZKM : Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2001
- Lysande, Edsvik Konst och Kultur, Stockholm, Sweden, 1997
- Pinholes, Museet For Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark, 1996
- The American Center, Paris, France, 1995
- During the Mois de la Photo
Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrelle, Paris, France, 1994
Texts
- Nathalie Boulouch (in French)
Enretien, Le Bulletin de la Société Française de Photographie, n° 7, Février 2000 - Thomas Y Levin (in English)
CTRL [SPACE] Rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, 2002 - yann beauvais (in English)
Document announcing the exhibition at the American Center, Paris, 1995 - Barbara Tannery (in English)
Interview, Katalog - Quarterly magazine for photography, Spring 1996