" Archive figurale : images, dispositifs, communauté "
Article
Award-winning text (excerpt)
"It is clear that Walker Evans and Société Réaliste, with seventy years apart - from analog photography to digital Internet - share a strong inclination to the objectivity of the machinic capture. If, to follow Michel Foucault, there is a speaking subject objectified by language, a productive subject objectified by work and economy, and a living subject objectified by the natural sciences, then there is a strong wager on the existence of a subject-trace objectified by the system of photography. All of us will have to deal with this aspect of our subjectivity : in our family albums, on our Facebook page, in the archives of all administrative organizations to which we are affiliated and, of course, our identity papers (...) How many times have we laughed through shame, mocked ourselves, mimicked our own faces as in front of a distorting mirror ? Every time, without being aware of it, it is the same reproducibility of subject-trace, its ability to be stored, classified, historicized, that we sacrifice all hope of recognizing ourselves, to please ourselves, to see our trace conformed with other facets of our subjectivity."
Excerpt from "Archive figurale : images, dispositifs, communauté", article published in the review De(s)générations, No. 18, "Vies anonymes", May 2013, Saint-Etienne, Jean-Pierre Huguet, Editor.
All criticism should include in its speech (...) an implicit speech on itself, criticism is criticism of the work is criticism of itself and to use a pun by Claudel, it is knowledge of the other and co-birth of oneself in the world.
Roland Barthes, "Qu'est-ce que la critique ?", 1963, Times Literary Supplement