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Raymonde April Untitled from Équivalences 1 2009 Courtesy Galerie Donald Browne |
BM: What was her response? Was this linguistic relationship something she had considered?
ER: Raymonde is incredibly open to other people’s ideas. She’s very much influenced by literature, which comes back to the linguistic reading. I believe she originally considered photography not as a photographer but as someone who is very interested in language and in the plastic arts. When she started doing photographs in the 1970s she wasn’t really thinking about it as a photographer, she doesn’t come from the documentary tradition at all.
BM: Which again plays into what you’ve identified as her spatial interests…
ER: I think so. What’s interesting, too, is the way her work has been addressed with a lot of emphasis placed on her personal experience and on her life. It’s almost as if her images are a visual diary. Because the protagonists are staged in French there is this idea of the figurantes, or the extras in a cinema set, as she calls them. They are always in her series.
Approaching her work by means of language sidesteps that personal narrative issue a bit, because language is something that is shared by people. If she is doing work that can be compared to language, it means that she is doing something that has an identifiable structure. At the same time, this is paradoxical because it is a language that only she speaks. So a very interesting tension develops between the personal and something that’s more shared.
BM: Is there still a narrative to be spoken of? Or do you see the work in these exhibitions as purely structural devices?
ER: I think it’s a very fine balance of both. When we started putting the series together, we were ideally imagining three shows that would give you exactly the same experience, but with different images. Then the requisites of her practice would bring on a new challenge. Every time we would meet in her studio, she would re-sequence the series, add new images that would have to “balance”…she couldn’t betray her practice.
Going to each gallery, comparing and seeing where the images would or wouldn’t work vis-à-vis the other shows, allowed me, the viewer, to analyze how Raymonde’s signature style emerges. What are the choices she makes to make things balance on the wall? It ended up being a project about itself. That’s what I’ve called “method.” It was a project addressing its own method of creating a new project.
BM: Where do the images that she’s combining and recombining in these installations come from? Are these new photos or past works that haven’t been shown before? How does she begin to choose these combinations?
ER: It’s pretty impressive. When you walk into her studio she has a table with a massive archive of thousands of images in little boxes. Some of them are 8 x 10 and some of them are 5 x 7, but they’re just all there. She’s now working more and more with digital cameras, so she’ll also just have images on the computer. This project grew out of that archive, and I think most of it has been created in the past 10 years.
One image on view at Les Territoires was actually found in China in a flea market. It was a small photograph that she blew up. It looks like one of her previous black and white images from the 1980s. You see this image and you say, “That’s like an old Raymonde April.” It’s very uncanny.
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