Before I saw this road for the first time, I had already seen it many times before
It’s easier if we get started with this citation. It originally came from a passage by Philippe Descola in the introduction to his lecture Les formes du paysage (Landscape forms): “before I saw this landscape for the first time, I had already seen it many times before”.
It often happens when you talk about landscapes. But you can also say the same thing about photography, from the photographer’s point of view, of course. You take a picture that has already been seen before. And that is precisely why you take it. Because what you see reminds you of an image, and so you immortalise the scene to acknowledge it, paying a sort of homage, a feeling of closeness and complicity; or perhaps the opposite is true in a certain sense: your recollection of the image makes the scene perceptible and transforms it into a possible image, and then you immortalise it because you are familiar with it.
Whether we’re talking about photography or landscapes, it is often a question of archetypes (there again, it is ever really about something different; something capable of going over and above these two spheres?). On many occasions, the question in photography, like the other figurative forms of art that came before it, is not about making a statement of fact, about showing how things went, but rather about acknowledging them and making them our own. Maybe that’s where the magic is: by doing this, through this ritual of acknowledging things that have already been seen before, it could be that you become part of the invention of something new. But that wasn’t the question, today’s question was: where is this road that I have never taken, but I have already seen?
ab, winter 2016
Alain Bublex’s project is part of the group exhibition 2016. Nuove esplorazioni, curated by Diane Dufour, Elio Grazioli and Walter Guadagnini.
