This exhibition brings together images extracted from each of the successive periods of my work. Photographs of large American cities from the 1970s and 1990s, others drawn from colour sets from the 2000s, elements taken from my ‘landscape’ period, my intimate phase, and my series on precarious objects and on mineral formations all rub shoulders in the exhibition. There is also space open to my current work: as is always the case with me, the images are taken in the flow of everyday life, but they speak to each other, or with retrieved visual elements, lifted, for example, from printed newspapers, producing effects that are halfway between vision and reading. The name of this current phase provides the title for the exhibition. The Book of Translations doesn’t only refer back to the importance that I attach to books. This title also alludes to my conception of photography: the constant activity of translating a certain reality (that, immediate and changing, of instant appearances) into another reality (that of photography, which can reproduce, by its very literalness, the enigmatic nature of the most obvious things). Hence the title of the new book of writings that I have just published, Le Réel de la photographie (The Reality of Photography). In my opinion, the question of knowing if photography belongs to ‘art’ is, when all is said and done, secondary if not inhibiting. What it is about is a form of philosophy in action. The affirmation of a presence to the world and the permanent openness to what could become of the gaze at any moment are photography’s primary concerns.

A. C.