Stéphane Couturier, Analogue and Digital Explorations of the City
In Toulon this summer (Hôtel des Arts, July 12–September 28) Stéphane Couturier is exhibiting his ongoing work around Climat de France, a housing project built by architect Fernand Pouillon in Algiers during the mid-1950s. In many respects, this project marks a break with the series made by the artist since 2005, which were characterized the use of digital montage. Not only does it see him return to a more documentary approach, but it also seems to indicate a new vision of architecture and the city..
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Your work extends over a period of some twenty years, but there seems to have been a change in 2005, when you went from analogue photography to montage. How do you explain this? It’s simple: along came the digital era. Rather than recording reality, digital photography records the virtual. With digital technology, photography is not limited by technique and is suddenly free to reinterpret the subject. Consequently, in the early 2000s, there were more and more questions about the work I was showing. Was it “digital,” was it collage—in other words, manipulation? In fact, it was the simple transcription of a photographed reality. Like all the photographers of my generation, I found this change really unsettling. I had two solutions: I could refuse the digital, spurn it, or I could face it and experiment with it. I chose to experiment with it, even if at the beginning I was seriously troubled by it. It was my work on the Toyota plant in Valenciennes that really enabled me to get hold of this tool. I was disappointed with the first images there, which I made in the spirit of my earlier series, and which didn’t really convey the complexity of the site. By juxtaposing two photographs and playing on different degrees of opacity and transparency in the image I was able to get closer to what I felt when I was actually there in that very distinctive industrial world. Using digital technology, the montages in the Melting Point series allowed me to better express the fluidity, movement and hybrid nature of our society.
BEYOND NARRATIVE
Do constructed images have the same documentary value as analogue ones? Merging two images was a way of enriching the information contained in the photograph while keeping the work’s documentary root. I felt that it was very important not to fall into a kind of abyss where everything is fiction. The two photos I start with are documentary, and when added together they create an image somewhere between tangible reality and virtual reality. Still, at any moment one can reconstitute the documentary chain by separating the two moments in the photographs. The value of the image that I get remains ambiguous, but the fact that the place and date of the photo are given in the title means that it keeps its documentary roots.
Retrospectively, is this melding of images really a rupture? People have often seen it that way but for me it’s more of an extension. In fact, the Melting Point series was made by scanning gelatin silver images and then processing them on the computer. The two techniques are thus combined both in the conception of the work and in the resulting images. But whereas before my photographs questioned the representation of a subject by working on the composition, with and after the Melting Point series photography becomes a material, a way of going beyond its narrative dimension. The break, though, is only a partial one, because my earlier work was already marked by this reality of flux, by the instability and indeterminacy of things and their representations.
Your interest in architecture seems to have changed, too. After rather commonplace sites, you appear to be focusing on work by major figures of the twentieth century, like Le Corbusier at Chandigarh and Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer in Brasilia. Why this focus on architectural modernism? These are architects who really thought about the cities of the future. Chandigarh and Brasilia were laboratories, the result of strong political decision-making. It was interesting to go back to them fifty years after their construction, not so much to observe their success or failure, though, as to question their representation in photography. At Chandigarh, for example, I synthesized Le Corbusier’s duality as both architect and artist. I combined his monumental frescoes and tapestries with his architectural work. This new reading
makes it possible to keep the constituent elements of his architecture intact but still recycle them in a more dynamic, mobile vision.
At the Hôtel des Arts in Toulon you are showing work on the Climat de France development by Fernand Pouillon. Why this interest in a figure on the margins of architectural modernism? I found Pouillon’s housing projects in Algiers, especially Climat de France, quite amazing. What struck me was their beauty, their mastery, their sweep. By using dressed stone rather than concrete, it’s true, Pouillon was going against Le Corbusier’s modernism. No doubt, however, it is the power of the architectural gesture that has allowed these housing estates to be preserved. I was fascinated by the structure of this architecture, which is very repetitive but rich with the differences created by the inhabitants. I liked the play of combinations it afforded. I also took a much closer interest in the historical context than I did in my earlier series. Here it is key. The “battle of housing” was part of the last-ditch efforts by metropolitan France to “save” French Algeria. Pouillon was expected to play his part. The five thousand housing units in the Climat de France project were built in record time. The war had already begun.
There is no digital montage. Is that specific to this project? The Melting Point series was my res- ponse to digital technology at the turn of the 2000s. Now I want to get back to a more documentary approach. Today, the digital era is engendering an inflation of the spectacular and the fictive, whereas for me the power of photography is still to be found in its connection to the reality that is photographed. With Climat de France, montage simply seemed redundant. In a way, its reality is stranger than fiction.
BARRIERS GOING DOWN
Fernand Pouillon distrusted photography. He didn’t allow publication of photos of his buildings and wrote in his memoirs that “Representation takes liberties with reality, idealizes or mocks it.” Where do you stand in relation to this condemnation of photography as a means of approaching architecture? My background is in architectural photography. I became aware of its limits pretty early. It’s a standardized instrument which obliterates context and puts the architecture on a pedestal. I prefer to be factual, contextual, and neutral by taking a frontal approach and showing fragments. I am plotting and mapping Climat de France, trying to capture the architectural and human dimensions of this housing project.
Yes, there is a strong human presence in this piece of work. Does this indicate a change in your approach to architecture and cities, a new emphasis on the way inhabitants appropriate them? The human element was in conflict with my desire to de-hierarchize the subject. The eye was inevitably drawn to the human figure, so I tried to erase it. But for a long time now I have been pondering the question of the portrait, which is the great subject of photography. This came naturally at Climat de France because I had to deal with the inhabitants in order to get inside this very closed place. That was a new and very enriching experience for me, so much so that I tried to work directly with the people. I made photographic portraits, then videos. The latter are still shots shown in a loop. They create an ambiguous space-time and institute a tension.
Video, which you have been working with since 2006, has a new role in your work now. What, for you, i s the difference between photography and video? I position myself in the hybrid space between these two mediums. Video extends photography, it does not replace it. It makes it possible to go from the fragmentary and the discontinuous to fluidity. My videos are loops, with no beginning or end. They dilate space and time. Like my photos, where there is no subject, my videos are not narrative and lend themselves to both immersion and contemplation.
The exhibition includes images that are quite diverse in nature and status, with autonomous photos, images stuck on the wall, videos and archives. Why this heterogeneity? I show a state of affairs based on the information I have gathered since 2011. It is a sketch of the atlas of this housing project that I want to make. There is no end to this work. In Chandigarh and Brasilia the subject could be done, covered. Here, it's the opposite. This heterogeneity reflects the richness of the subject, which has multiple layers. It also signifies the fact that nowadays it is not enough to respond to such richness with a single medium. The evolution of the technology for taking and printing photos means we can be free of old definitions and supports. We can make videos with a still camera and supports like wallpaper can be used to make installations. So why not do it? An image can have different statuses and exist both in a frame and stuck directly on the wall. We have to think more flexibly about photography and be positive about that. Photography is opening up. Barriers are going down. This exhibition i s conceived to be positioned at the intersection of these new possibilities.
Translation, C. Penwarden