[.......] the "Mois de la Photo," a month-long showcase of the photographic arts, made its tenth biennial appearance in November 1998 under the artistic direction of Jean-Luc Monterosso. Created in 1980 at the same moment when critical and commercial interest in photography began to increase exponentially, the "Mois de la Photo" not single seeks to provide a collective framework for individual exhibitions of historical and contemporary interest, but it also organizes them into a conceptual whole. This year's exhibition proposed three overarching themes: l'enfermement and the complex of associations engaged by both photography's affinity for the technologies of imprisonment and its formal character as a frame or enclosure; l'intimité and the embeddedness of photography in everyday life, its ability to convey both proximity and detail; and I'événement, an acknowledgment of photography's continuing role in documenting the events of modern life, placing us once again at the tangled intersection between photography's artistic aspirations, its commercial exploitation as a technology of mass media and its importance in forging the images that become our collective memories. In 1998 79 exhibits were given the honor of official affiliation with the "Mois de la Photo," with countless others riding on the event's coattails. Such a critical mass of past and recent, newly challenging and marvelously familiar work is not only exciting, but also exhausting and occasionally dispiriting. This may be precisely the point, for like it or not, such extended showcases as the "Mois de la Photo" compell consideration of photography's limits and capacities; it requires that we question whether there is anything left for photography to do.
Fortunately, a number of persuasive answers were advanced, among them a series of photograms by Roselyne Pelaquier exhibited at the Galerie Jean-Pierre Lambert. Entitled "Le Corps pensif" ("The Thinking Body"), each small image appeared as an almost calligraphic, barely figurative (but not quite) form, a mark etched on contrasting ground. These marks (or forms) neither describe nor reproduce the body, even as they are literally produced by the play of light over the human skulls that Pelaquier arranged on photosensitive paper. Few of these marks are literally recognizable as skulls but each manages to sustain the connection to the body nonetheless - with a jagged play of cracks and fissures suggestive of the body's folds and crevices, or dance-like ciphers that seem to approximate bodily gesture and movement, all the while remaining intransigently motionless. In these images Pelaquier has pared the photogram's formal possibilities down to the bare minimum, working within a pictorial economy that banishes transparency, substituting instead the bony picked-clean contrast between a starkly limned but unnamable "something" (either the black or white) and incipient nothingness (also either the black or white).
Pélaquier's interest in modes of bodily inscription, in cultural taboos regulating the representation of the body and in archetypal forms might suggest a relationship to the work of her better-known french colleague Annette Messager. But Pelaquier's images seem not so much intent on finding fetishistic body surrogates as on inscribing the body's absence through processes and metaphors that still remain insistently material, tactile and indexically bound to the body. The results appear as much invested in the cerebral character of abstraction and the formal characteristics of photography as the hard physical facts of the body - as if for Pélaquier, there was no need to choose. This seems to be the general context for Pélaquier's observation that, "The photogram approaches the question of the relationship to the real differently: it begins with touch and contact. It privileges proximity rather than space, surface rather than focus, skin rather than eyes. It has faith in the thickness of shadow". It also seems to be the reason for her choice of the skull as a shape/object at once structural, present, concrete and yet empty, stripped and vacated of the significance that once rendered it a vessel of the "self".
Jeannene M. Przyblyski
Afterimage, mars 1999