Translation (1997) bears the traces of a series of transformations, transfers and passages between media, each with different historical determinations. The starting point is a Thomas Edison film entitled Panorama of Beach and Cliff House (1903) in which one can see a long panoramic camera movement.
Reminiscent of Rosalind Krauss’ reference to Roland Barthes’ allusion to the mythological story of the ship Argo, where over years of successive voyages each element that comprises the ship is replaced until nothing of the original material referent remains except its name, this project is thought of as a kind of shell which contains an iteration in the life of an evolving set of materials that have been subjected to a prolonged series of operations.
In the course of its history, Panorama of Beach and Cliff House has been many things. Before 1912, copyright laws specific to motion pictures didn’t exist. In 1896, Edison introduced the idea of making a long photographic paper strip encompassing every individual film still in order to stake a claim on authorship. At specific moments in the life of these already hybrid images, the “original” was lost, the paper prints were refilmed onto 16mm film stock, then onto 35mm, before being transferred to video, and then digitized before finding their way onto the Internet. Each of these different forms participates in separate histories, distinct archives.
Translation reverses this logic. The film is downloaded, and digital film stills are then selected and organized spatially as a 4 meter-long computer printout. As with Déplacement, this shift from the verticality of the original film stock to the horizontality of a panoramic photograph, brings to light a latent image that exists in the intervallic space of translation.
Expositions
- L’Effet Film - figures, matières et formes du cinéma en photographie, 1999 -
- Galérie Le Réverbère 2, Lyon
- Centre de Photographie de Lectoure
- École Régionale des Beaux-Arts de Cherbourg, France
- Les vacances à la mer, souvenirs de famille, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 1997
Texts
- Nathalie Boulouch (in French)
Enretien, Le Bulletin de la Société Française de Photographie, n° 7, Février 2000 - Philippe Dubois (in French)
MOUVEMENTS IMPROBABLES - L’Effet cinéma dans l’art contemporain, 2003
L’EFFET FILM - figures, matières et formes du cinéma en photographie, 1999 - Paul-Louis Roubert (in French)
Entretien sur le site de la Société Française de Photographie, 2007
