Artist
Arno Brignon
Arno Brignon (b. 1976) lives and works in Toulouse. With a background as an educator in underprivileged neighbourhoods, he later devoted himself fully to photography, joining the Signatures agency in 2013. Brignon’s work questions the place of man in the world, exploring ideas of territory and memory through a poetic photographic approach. He divides his time between teaching, residency programmes, personal research and assignments for various media outlets. Brignon’s images are regularly exhibited both domestically and internationally, whilst his works is found in a series of private and public collections. Thus far, he has published four books Ancrages, D'après une histoire vraie, La formacion de las olas, and Terre et Territoire #1.
Us
My journey started in 2018, travelling through 12 cities named after historical European capitals, located in the heart of America. It was a symbolic road trip, studying a country born of men who came from Europe and drove out indigenous populations; an introspective journey to question the links between our two continents. Is the American dream not an invention of the first settlers, themselves excluded from an old world – and in search of a new one where everything was possible? Segregation and racism, so prevalent in American society, have their roots in a slave trade established by Europe. So many common histories which, like family secrets, stay silent, repressed or distorted. There is an ambivalent relationship between our two continents, tinged with admiration and jealousy. A mutual detestation and love that makes us inseparable.
There’s a sense of Robert Frank, Jack London, Dolores Marat or Wim Wenders in the path I followed. But beyond photographic heritage, the project draws on memories of my personal history; I remember my father's long absences on transatlantic business trips when I was a child. I never went with him. Today, my own projects often take me away from my family. In an attempt to break the cycle, this time we'll go together; my partner, my daughter and I. The relationship between family life and photographic work is always a complex balance, and intertwining family and photography in this way has lent my work an unprecedented intimacy.
From his experience as an educator on the edges of Toulouse, Arno Brignon (1976), keeps an appeal for works built in a collaborative way, often within the framework of workshop and residency projects rooted in urban or rural contexts. Invited to Aussillon (South of France), he works in a housing area undergoing rehabilitation and occupies an apartment in one of the deserted buildings to live, photograph and arrange meals; the practice of portraiture becomes one of the ways in which he recreates, with the inhabitants, the memory of the place. In Valparaiso, he employs the calotype process to express the alteration of memory and the disappearance of the social bond. Gradually, the photographer moves towards an assumed onirism, embracing the random, seeking the accident. Recently, he went on a photographic trip to the United States with his family in the form of a road movie (Us, 2018-2022) in which photography serves as a link, both with strangers he met along the way and with members of his family. His use of outdated analogue films, products of a past industry, entrusts his photographic act to the erosion of the film, leaving room for the work of time.
Damien Caccia's (1989) photography fits into a pictorial practice. His painting, initially figurative at the end of his studies, becomes more and more abstract. The figuration of the matter becomes little by little its theme, and the painter scrapes so much and more until preserving only the trace of the gesture which affixed the color. The canvas becomes the place of a former action of which is preserved only a mark more and more evanescent, altered. It is for its quality of residual imprint that the painter seizes photography. At one time he undertook to record with a portable scanner the entirety of a garden in order to restore it in the form of a large roll of paper, via fax. Later still, it is the screen of the telephone whose memory he comes to probe, seeking beyond the screen saver to find the ghostly image that this one comes to dissimulate. With Tears (2015-2022), he creates an attention-grabbing set: tiny details, insignificant moments held, somehow, on small surfaces (fine drops of glue) similar to damaged lenses.
Folding, assembling, piercing, braiding paper: the work of Marc-Antoine Garnier (1989) thwarts the two dimensions of the photographic cliché. Is it photography? The act of taking a picture is only a preliminary, the existence of the future image is played out in other gestures, subsequent, which come to build a space of paper surfaces. Large rolls of sunsets arranged in a blank room recreate a colored harmony, a dappled blue sky sees the course of its clouds replayed by the cutting of the framed image into several wavy strips. At the beginning, there is thus Marc-Antoine Garnier who photographs not so much "on the motif" as the pattern itself, sensing the gestures, often multiple, that will accompany it to put it back into space. His pattern is always natural; his basic material is the infinity of the great elements. Recently, he plunged into the vegetal infinity, the lens in a jungle of branches or a forest of petals, to go and look for, on the surface of their image, the perceived form still contained in the thickness of the paper: the long and fine foliage are braided and find their indocility and the speckles of bunches of flowers, by scraping, to resurface.
At the heart of Nina Medioni's (1991) photographic form lies the encounter and the long time. The photographer invests places sometimes linked to her personal history, sometimes unknown. In her survey, the camera becomes a tool: a box to record the territory through which she passes. She often chooses the summer time, dilated, without any apparent event, indolent. The event then, the one by which the image will come about, is the encounter. To bring it about, there is the presence, unusual in these environments, of the camera and the spoken word. It is not surprising then that we often find in her photographic projects, series of images, portraits and gestures taken in the same time-space. None of the portraits in the same shot take priority over the other, she explains. She places them on the page, careful not to cut their speech; it is then up to us to read the transcript of the words exchanged with this young boy from Prépaou, a small residential town in the South of France. Recently, she realized in Israel, The Veil (2019-2022), a photographic project of greater scale. There she surveys a distant, unfamiliar family territory and seeks through photography and portraiture to weave a heretofore non-existent link. The camera is then a limit-space, where to try to meet the members of a part of her family that she does not know, belonging to an orthodox Jewish community. The photographic image will record here the attempt of confrontation, the elusive success or the failure. The photographic surface then embodies the threshold on which the photographer and the photographed stand. Recently, she directed Le Chalet (2022), a short film about a mysterious house in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, inhabited by her uncle. The meetings with the residents, young and old, of the neighborhood, the brief or recurring dialogues make emerge the contours of a "chalet" planted on the boulevard, which she will always make sure to leave in the background. In Nina Medioni's work, the photographer's taking of the image and the person being photographed's taking of the words are definitely linked.