The photographic act, a universal epic

Introductory text from the monograph Matrix of Worlds, published by SKIRA, written by REZA, photographer, and Rachel Deghati, author.

To mark the publication of Matrices du monde, Muriel Pénicaud's first collection of photographs, we have chosen to consider the photographic act as the possible odysseys of a universal language. We will attempt to outline the narratives of the image, from intention to the trace left behind, by exploring the frame, the off-screen space and meditation. Since photography came to Muriel Pénicaud, the visual epic she has chosen through what we will call her "intimate wanderings of the image" is that of poetry. 

Becoming a photographer means allowing worlds to permeate us and trying to outline them. It also means revealing these universes by drawing lines of light in the darkness. 

Lines of poetry, of paradoxically absolute truth, of assumed subjectivity and also of invisibles, rendered to the real.

Drawing lines of light.

In the beginning, the adventure of looking at the world is the story of a chance encounter with the photographic tool, this object to be tamed in the service of an imperious necessity, of an intimate, silent conversation between oneself, one's soul, one's silences, one's questions and the world that invites itself into our interior landscapes. 

The first verses of the Maznavi, the major book by the Persian poet Rûmi, come to mind: "beshno-az-ney" "Listen to the reed flute" and he continues: "Listen to its lament. It tells of the complaint of separations (…) ". Does this poem not remind us of the memory of that state of vulnerability conducive to the inner wanderings of adolescence? 

The end of childhood and its promise of enigmatic, and therefore uncertain, tomorrows is often conducive to the beginnings of the exploration of a new language. To these Persian verses, we can also follow this other proposition: "Bebin." "Look." It is to this invitation that some people, as they leave childhood, respond when they find themselves in the presence of a camera. An object of new perceptions and writings that transforms them. Among these young people who leave childhood, the language of the image enters their lives as a new form of expression. A silent dialogue is insidiously established. The eyes sweep unknowingly, are attracted by this or that fragment of life, fix themselves and the camera freezes the moment of poetry, of doubt, of questioning, of truth too. 

When visual storytellers emerge early in life, their gaze rarely leaves the world. They can't help but scrutinize it, as if it were second nature. Throughout their lives, they continue this long, daily journey of visual narratives, a kind of intimate travelogue.

Each photograph captured is a renewed attempt to tangibly recount a frozen moment, defying its ephemeral nature. It is upon leaving childhood, initially in a personal quest, that some begin to tame the light, engaging in a visual dialogue with the worlds they have witnessed and narrated.

Drawing a frame

The wonder of discovering light sculpting the different layers of darkness, revealing shapes and depths, subjects and lines, is met by another outline: that of a frame, which represents an initial selection by the person observing and capturing a scene. They believe they are showing the truth as it appears to them, acting as a witness, even as the eyes of those who are not there. The viewfinder's frame becomes complicit in an intention. It determines the chosen part within the vastness of a landscape, among the multitude of gestures, expressions, and movements of a human being, in the organized flight of migrating birds, and in solitary takeoffs. 

The act of photographing is first and foremost an intention: to translate as closely as possible to reality. The Italian saying "Traduttore, traditore" (translator, traitor) comes to mind. The frame reveals not a betrayal, but the sincere illusion that storytelling through images is a demonstration of truth. The drawing of the frame in reality is a choice, an interpretation. Thus, from the same scene contemplated by ten photographers, as many different images will be born as there are gazes cast upon it. To photograph is to accept that subjectivity interferes with the image and that this rewriting of reality determines the direction of the viewer's gaze. And the words that witnesses place on the image, answering the five questions "Where? Who? What? When? Why?" are only there to try to contain a semblance of factual information within the confines of the frame. 

The Imperative Words Beyond the Frame

Photography could stop at this initial mission of bearing witness, staying as close as possible to reality. The photojournalist embarking on a campaign of truth documents the world, striving to adhere to the journalistic ethics of claimed impartiality. This remains an illusion. The frame cracks on all sides, and what lies beyond the frame enters documentary photography through the small portion of reality chosen by the author in their viewfinder, but also through the written and spoken words that accompany the image afterward, as well as the suggested words and their train of thoughts, emotions, and partial highlighting. The image within its frame seems to be a valiant soldier of truth, but it is only a fragile servant. Once captured, the photograph begins its multiple lives. The spoken and unspoken words constitute narratives with variable geometry between fiction and reality around the image. Words jostle, dance around it, and reveal it a little differently each time. They forge multiple dialogues between the author and their photograph, between the author-storyteller and their listeners-readers, to whom they address narratives that are eminently historical and political. Despite the photographers' attempt at sincerity, the stories prove to be slightly changing depending on the days, the memories that impose themselves, and others that fade away. Around the image, other words emerge: the words of those who are not the authors of the photograph but who appropriate its meaning and intention, analyzing, describing, sometimes distorting the facts of reality and twisting the truth. The image, through the erroneous caption, is then used knowingly or not, to serve an ideology, a lie, or simply to assert a position as a historian of the image. It is the out-of-frame of a betrayal that enters the world of the image, ours, even that of History. In France, the birthplace of photography, in the early 90s, an association, Droits de regard (Rights of View), was created at the initiative of photographers to denounce the lack of rigor or ethics widespread in newsrooms that mistreated photographs, facts, and the intention of photojournalists. 

From Beyond the Frame to a Shared Meditation

What about the photographers (and some rare photojournalists are among them) who leave the mission of the "journalist" to other destinies and use the image not as an act of sociological, political, and/or historical narration, but as an act of poetic creation? Their intention is not to document but to share states of their relationship with the world. The frame, the frozen moment, are only modest pretexts for an assumed invitation to a teeming out-of-frame, theirs, but not only theirs, the out-of-frame of those who, contemplating the image, let emotion and thought seize their soul, inviting them on other paths of awareness of a part of the world and of themselves. 

No information, no facts, no truth, no date, no words with these photographers, but the desire for a silent shared meditation. In this place, with each renewed image, their poetic quests invite contemplation and a dialogue between oneself and oneself, between oneself and the photographer, between oneself and the world given to embrace. Within the human family, these photographs tend to build bridges other than that of the recognition of a common History. They leave discreet traces that resonate as so many possibilities of universality and timelessness of an ineffable, collective memory of the senses.

This is called poetry.

In a photographer's journey, the publication of a first book marks a legitimate desire to share their inner worlds with the rest of the world. Matrices du monde (Matrices of the World) is an invitation on each page, through each chosen image, to recognize the insatiable curiosity that has driven its author, Muriel Pénicaud, since she appropriated photography as an intimate escape and as a tool for narration, that is, since adolescence. In France and elsewhere, Muriel Pénicaud observes the worlds. Whether she casts her gaze on the majestically folded wings of a bird, whether she caresses with her eyes the velvety texture of a face, whether she captures on the fly a passionate kiss between two lovers, whether she seizes the carefree spirit in the movement of a dress and the hair of a happy and free little girl, whether she freezes in formidable compositions different states of presence of red in a succession of photographs to better share her gaze on women, whether she plays with shadow and light, lines and curves, whether she lowers her gaze on the humus of forests and the roots of trees, Muriel invites us to guess and follow a little-known part of herself, the sensitive and greedy candor with which she has observed the world for decades, lets it enter her and generously gives it to us to see. Each of her photographs is an act of creation that allows us to penetrate her multiple intimate poetic universes, of which her photographs are traces, imprints of the world left on the walls of our collective visual and emotional memory.

And when our gaze stops on a photograph of an assembly of birds on the fragile surface of the water, then some verses from the Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Attar come to mind.

"If you finally opened the eyes of the invisible"

The atoms of the universe would tell you their secrets

But if the eye you open is the eye of reason

You will never be able to see love as it is (...)

Letting ourselves be drawn on the paths of Muriel Pénicaud's poetic visual explorations through her Matrices du Monde (Matrices of the World), images remain engraved in us. They tell us that their author knows how to look at the world with her soul. 

Fleeting Moments

Preface to the monograph Matrices des Mondes (Matrices of the Worlds), published by SKIRA editions, written by Maria Cristina Madau, artistic director

In her artistic approach, the photographer Muriel Pénicaud does not choose the sensational, but the poetry of life's moments in all its forms. What touches us in her images is the way her gaze is cast. She opens a breach in reality, creating a space of suspension in everyday time. The artist invites us to perceive these moments with a different clarity, she invites us to look at the extraordinary force of life, made of fleeting moments, freedom and wild grace. Her gaze is like a ray of light that illuminates scenes to reveal their hidden beauty. Muriel Pénicaud asks us to take a break from our ordinary time to lead us to a time of contemplation of simplicity.

The portraits that the photographer offers us are of great humanity. Without judgment or prejudice, the artist offers us a palette of emotions, which allows us to touch the intimacy of the characters without ever violating it, while preserving the dignity of these moments. The viewer is invited to observe the scene and share their emotions. Without ever exposing this scene, the artist makes us participate in a game of revelations that respects modesty and the magic of mystery. Each image refers us to a story highlighting a moment in the life of the character and questioning our vision of the world, in a cathartic movement where the viewer recognizes himself in the grace or in the daily life of these gestures and these looks that awaken in us a deep feeling of belonging to humanity.

We also experience deep emotions when looking at the images of birds, first of all because we are touched by the beauty, strength and majesty that emanate even from the most ordinary moments, but also because we are fascinated by these spectacular images of their aerial dances, which arouse in us this wonder and admiration for the greatness of this gesture so coveted, but which is denied to us: the flight. These birds offer us the joy of freedom, the artist invites us to abandon ourselves and let our spirit fly away with them.

Nature is always present in Muriel Pénicaud's scenes, it is made of all the nuances of the sensations that human, animal, plant bodies and those of the elements arouse in us. Matter and form express the depth of the content, from sentient beings to the play of clouds in the sky, without forgetting the stones that mark the earth or accompany man in urban architectures.

Thus, in the awe-inspiring images of trees, the artist asks us to silently listen to the earth itself, which expresses its tragic yet vital presence, sculpted into the woody body since an ancient era.

Wind into the Roots

Written by Pierre Bongiovanni, exhibition curator

Chosen from thousands, the photographs gathered here present different aspects of the procession of trees that accompanies Muriel Pénicaud in her forest explorations, seeking the myriad facets of human nature and the primordial resonance of life.

The forest is perhaps the last place that unreservedly evokes the layers of human destiny, calling us to a final awakening. The photographer does not attribute human feelings to the trees.

As always in her work as an artist, she favors the enchantment and incredulity, even the astonishment, felt in her relationship with the trees, which allows her to access a profound dimension of who we are and how we are doing, both literally and figuratively.

She embraces a bold form of forest transcendence that opens the doors to memories buried in the dark and intriguing undergrowth of childhoods, legends, and thwarted domesticities. By looking at them, she invites us to understand what, in our lives, contributes to sustaining the world as well as what contributes to destroying it.

Here, one encounters monstrous embraces, vertiginous intertwinings, plant cavalcades, excesses, and unexpected trances. But also the elegances and flashes of brilliance that exist alongside the abysses and their torments.

We are reminded that one of the disastrous results of the pact between King Gilgamesh and the creature Inkidou (half animal, half divine) was the murder of the giant Hombaba, lord of the great Cedar forest. Since then, human vanities have continued to destroy forests in a trembling epiphany, like those that precede apocalypses, as there have been so many in the long millennia of our history. Humans rush to their doom, forgetting the vital co-evolution between them and the trees for hundreds of thousands of years.

The trees she seeks to photograph are undoubtedly intermediaries between two worlds: that of undulating passions and that of fragile eternities. Their telluric power is such that it forces us at every step to revise our criteria for thinking in order to try to live up to their apparent immobility and their senseless patience.

Water, earth, and air mysteriously combine there. And what alerts us here is how she questions our humanity by way of the trees. She does not photograph the trees. The trees "speak" to her about us. And this exchange, via her gaze, between them and us, invites us to greater humanity.

Here are the gnarled Beeches, heirs to a chaotic and mysterious destiny, prostrate, bushy, with short trunks that mock their common beech brothers, perceived as dominant, sometimes tyrannical (nothing grows under their foliage), with haughty elegance, and who made the heyday of clog makers and paper pulp manufacturers.

Here is the Common Hornbeam, at home everywhere, under all suns and comfortable with all soils, whose magnificent wood allowed for axles, hubs, mill gear teeth, press screws, masses, mallets, robust tool handles, as well as the most solid butcher's cutting tables.

And then this Wild Cherry, a wild cherry tree with its bark in satiny circular strips, whose fruit is disputed between children, blackbirds, and starlings. The Ancients recommended its use to treat apoplexy, epilepsy, and to develop the famous Kir from Clairegoutte in Haute-Saône.

And the Oak with the healing bark, confidant of the gods, link between the sky and

the great depths. The priests deciphered the voices that pass through its leaves. It allowed the construction of ships leaving for the Americas, but also cathedrals, barrels in which great wines slumber... A fundamental tree that provides society with an inexhaustible reserve of soul.

And this magnificent Birch, with its milk-colored trunk, called the people's well by the Russians because it provides heating in winter, light with its bark rolled into torches, and healing with its sap. Birch forests, natural refuges for wolves, lynx, bears, and lovers who engrave their names in its tender bark.

Wind into the Soul

Written by Pierre Bongiovanni, exhibition curator

Often, photographers seek to describe what they perceive of reality. They try to document the world or bear witness.

Muriel Pénicaud's approach is of a different nature. Here, the images are doors, and each one opens the possibility of a narrative in the consciousness of the viewer. Whether this narrative concerns the reality of the photographed situation or not is of no importance.

For her, what matters, as in her previous work around birds ("Wind under the Wings"), is the state of incredulity, even amazement, into which the situation she photographs plunges her.

Whether these images were taken yesterday or today, here or elsewhere, is also irrelevant. These moments did indeed exist, they presented themselves to her, she seized them, transformed them into images to try to understand and then share their spell.

In this new series dedicated to women, she positions herself as a woman among women and is completely resolved to not give up anything, neither on her singularity nor on her freedom to think and act as such.

The women she celebrates, beyond ages, cultures, religions, and ideologies, demonstrate their capacity to express their freedom, autonomy, and sovereignty through the strength born from the power of their inner selves. It is because they have this ability to give their presence in the world an epic dimension that they are also capable of embodying the desire for movement and freedom.

By identifying this in other women, she admits to recognizing herself in them, while also offering the viewer, whether child or adult, man or woman, the gift of finding themselves in it as the irreplaceable and indispensable repository of all the world's mysteries.

Wind under the Wings

Written by Pierre Bongiovanni, exhibition curator for Muriel Pénicaud's exhibitions: Wind under the Wings, Wind into the Soul, Wind into the Roots.

The bird embodies the divine. 

When it disappears, there will be nothing left.

Neither men nor gods.

Nothing left to tickle the sky.

Nothing left to pay homage to the earth.

The bird unites the angel and the demon.

When it disappears, there will be nothing left.

Neither good nor evil. Neither beauty nor monstrosity.

Nothing left to signify the invisible.

Nothing left to rekindle the embers.

Muriel Pénicaud does not 'photograph birds'.

She photographs what they still embody.

The myths, the divinities, the angels,

the demons, the men.

She attempts to restore in us

a part of the splendor that once belonged to us.*

When it disappears, there will be nothing left. 

Neither men nor gods. 

Nothing left to tickle the sky. 

Nothing left to pay homage to the earth.

Muriel Pénicaud does not 'photograph birds'. 

She photographs what they still embody. 

The myths, the divinities, the angels, the demons, the men. 

She attempts to restore in us a part of the splendor that once belonged to us.

---

For four decades, Pierre Bongiovanni has been involved in the French and international artistic and cultural scene in various capacities. As artistic director of creation centers and festivals, through teaching, publications, writing, conferences, and artistic performances, he explores all means at the service of art to tell the story of the world. Since 2009, he has been the artistic director of the Maison Laurentine, a place for residencies, exhibitions, installations, and a research center.