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.