At the Maison de la photographie in Brest, it’s also back to school. And it starts off very strongly, with an American geography lesson: did you know that Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, Lisbon, London, Dublin, Brussels, Luxemburg, Rome, Athens, Madrid are American cities (Paris, you know that since the success of Wim Wenders’ film, “Paris, Texas”)? No? Well, imagine that some of their inhabitants are also unaware that these names first designate European capitals. And although eponymous, these cities display abysmal contrasts.
Arno Brignon, a Toulouse photographer invited by the gallery, takes us to discover them.
Family road trip
On the road, which he will take three times (three times one month) between 2018 and 2022, the artist will not be alone since his wife and daughter will accompany him.
These family trips will bring contradictory issues (taking photos/visiting) but will also constitute a re-establishment of Arno Brignon’s global and future artistic project: including his family in the project AND photographing them.
This is how in “Us” – the title of the exhibition which can be read on two levels, “we” in English and US for United States – we find, throughout the sixty or so black frames, photos of his wife and his teenage daughter.
Downgrading
What we are given to see, hanging on the line, without caption, forming a sort of asphalt ribbon, generally reeks of oblivion, downgrading, the disinheritance of small-town white America.
Arno Brignon photographs it as much in the symbolic representations that we have of it (wide open spaces, a man in a cowboy hat, wooden buildings or huts or even a solitary white horse galloping) as in the faces of adults or children…
Because, unconsciously, when we “take a photo, it already exists in us,” says the artist. “We have been imbued, for decades, with this symbolic iconography of America.”
For decades, we have been steeped in this symbolic iconography of America.
Deconstruction
So, perhaps to better deconstruct this iconographic symbolism, Arno Brignon will use expired silver films and old cameras to produce his report. The result is saturated, grainy, sometimes blurred shots, in black and white or with dominant colors of red or green; some will see Lynch or Wenders for the cinema, Turner or Hopper for the painting, others will think literature and will call upon great names, Faulkner, Harrison, Kerouac, others finally, will perhaps hear the complaints of a distant blues or the guitar of Ry Cooder.
He is attached to the materiality of objects, to what they produce in themselves, to the trace they leave. This is why “Us” also exists as a book, whose critics agree on the high quality of the texts.
Practical
Exhibition visible until November 16, every day except Sunday, from 2 to 7 p.m. at the Maison de la Photographie, 1 rue Henri Moreau in Brest. 09 87 33 31 99
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