Voix/Voices

Open, non-linear collection of works using a mixture of techniques. Twenty images that represent some of my internal voices.

My project Voix / Voices began during a seven-day immersive workshop with Todd Hido in southern France. Coming from literature (I’m a writer, critic, and translator), where the narrative aspect is almost too obvious to mention, let alone elevate to the status of the one aspect to rule them all, I had been struggling with the almost obsessive focus on “storytelling” I encountered in the world of photography. To me, it sounded like a buzzword nobody really cared to examine in greater depth.

In my unfinished PhD thesis, I had carefully analyzed the different possible relationships between the poems in a collection, so I was surprised to find that the term visual storytelling is almost exclusively used to cover all sequential relationships within a “series” of pictures. Of course, writers like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes have already warned against the illusion of photographs telling stories, but I still felt somewhat cornered when discussing my photographic work during masterclasses with prominent photographers.

During the week with Todd Hido, who also considers himself a storyteller, I decided to completely let go and listen to my inner voices—whatever they might be saying—without worrying about narrative or thematic coherence. The result was a surprisingly open collection, using a mixture of techniques: infrared false colour, black-and-white negatives treated as positives, “normal” colour processed as infrared, and even simple “normal” colour. Yet the series makes a remarkably coherent impression, no doubt because these pictures or “voices” all spring from the same artistic source.

It’s a fluid, evolving body of work in which images can be added, moved, or removed; presented in sequence like a long sentence (in which noun-images and verb-images would be tinted by adverb-images and put to rhythm by comma-images or exclamation point-images); arranged as a constellation; or even musically composed as a slideshow. This is the project I want to pursue over the coming years, adding new images and presenting them in different forms.