The ubiquity of the image

Interesting example, that one of Robin Collyer and his ‘semiological cosmetics’ (J.F.)!

The profusion of images is inversely proportional to their legibility. The profusion itself acts as a form of ‘noise’, in the semiotic sense of the term, that prevents us from seeing! Stripped of contents, Collyer’s ‘empty’ images become more ‘visible’ than before.

Starting out from the perception that every image appears in a world already full of images, another young artist, the Swiss-French Matthias Bruggmann, no longer satisfied with examining photography’s relationship with the real, sets out to make visible the relationship between the new image and the images that already existed before it was created.

Apparently, all of Matthias Bruggmann’s photographs belong to the category of reportage, and were taken in the field, often in very difficult conditions - Iraq, Haiti, Somalia. The ethics of photo reportage is respected: no staging, no manipulation after the shot is taken. And yet, in every instance, his image not only bears witness to the photographed instant but deliberately evokes the style of a well-known photographer or, in some cases, makes direct reference to a familiar image. In the case of this image of Chernobyl, made in 2006, a confrontation between two drunks outside a bar -a frequent occurrence in a place where alcoholism is endemic- is photographed in a way that resorts without hesitation to the celebrated mises-en-scène of Jeff Wall. By inverting the relations, the real scene invokes the fiction of the mise-en-scène. Bruggmann thus deconstructs the myth of a photography that would offer direct contact with the real and reminds us that every photograph has a double referent: that of its subject and that of the world of the images that have preceded it.