From Hand to Mouth (1993) was an attempt to push the boundaries of my photography in several directions at once. The work consists of one continuous analog photographic print, composed of 24 successive exposures, measuring 22 meters by 1 meter. Each image represents my hand touching an everyday domestic object (a chair, a telephone, a book…) and was produced by placing a piece of film directly in my mouth, using it as a camera obscura. Each photographed object is printed life-size with the entire negative visible, including sprocket holes. The surface of each image bears witness to this corporeal presence (saliva, fingerprints), doubly emphasizing the idea of a physical connection with the real.
From hand to mouth also quotes from an historical form, the nineteenth-century panorama. At the same time, it pares the form down, removing its specific architecture and the privileged point of view of its central viewing platform, and other devices for concealing artifice in order to ask other questions of it.
The work’s title underscores a certain ambiguity, foregrounding an idiomatic expression for possessing only the bare essentials, while at the same time denoting the idea of measurement, a literalizing of the distance “from hand to mouth”. A number of concerns – an exploration of the interplay between images and language, a reflection on the indexical relationship, an insistence on the apparatus - find a different articulation in its counterpoint, Fonce Alphonse, which is shown together with this work.
Exhibitions
- The Spaces of the Image, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Maison de la culture Frontenac, Montreal, Canada, 2009
- Pinholes, Museet For Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark, 1996
- The American Center, Paris, France, 1995
- Le 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
Articles (in French)
