Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

I will finish this blogging week by the precious works of Liz Deschenes. Her approach of photography is to me one of the most interesting on the question to what an image is. In french we don't make any specific difference with the word image. In english, the word image is the objet of a visual impression, picture is an artefact. In those works, I could talk about pictures that hide images, and images that dissolve themselves at the surface of pictures. This interest for the dissolution, for the expression of gradual disappearance of the representation takes diverses forms. Beyond a representation, beyond the need of the creation of a ressembance to mitigate the absence. But if image is originally a masque, what is it hiding today? Liz Deschenes is working with perpetual misappropriation of the process of photographic images apparition. She uses the basic technics of argentic photography, forgetting about the classic representation inherent to the medium. The artist's interest are located in the properties of photography, light, and sight. She produces photogrammes, which are basic elements of the story of realism which were screens and photographs. Liz Deschenes product furtive photographic images, non fixed upon the gleaming surfaces. In front of those photographs we look the light in face, we don't see that much. Those figure of dazzle leaves us in front of elusive images. In this reflexion on the uses and the limits of the representation, Deschenes introduced also a reflexion with the space. with the exposure space. The gallery. To close another loop here are not performative photographs we watch, but photographs that perform a space. I think it is turning quite unexpected. For several years, Liz Deschenes has explored the technical apparatus of photography—its materials, equipment, and processes. Her resulting body of work is both critically self-reflexive and lushly beautiful, hovering between photographic images and three-dimensional art objects. The photographs /photograms made by a camera-less process in which photosensitive paper is exposed to light, recording variations in tone. This technique is often used to capture the silhouette of an object placed on the paper; to create these works, however, Deschenes exposed the paper—unobstructed—outside, documenting the ambient light itself. One of the last works of Liz Deschenes, "Photographs" a series of photogrammes created by the exposure of photosensible paper by night, fixed then with silver toner, approach the objectivity of photography. Indeed, those photographs, naked, don't represent anything, as they stand, but to the passage of somebody in front of them, they reflect lightly the silouette. This mirror effect is an auto-referenced practice in a photograph, which is no longer centred on it self but turns and returns to the viewer in an parralaxe question. Its work for me are a rich source of questions about photography, sometimes beautiful responses to the overall use made of photograph. By the exposure of the photographic process, Liz Deschenes offers much to see without representing anything, without that nothing can be identified. It up with radical photography at the crossroads of mediums. I am pleased to see this commitment, this exigency of setting minimum perspective of a medium whose form, if not the formats, have been questioned too little in my opinion. www.miguelabreugallery.com/LizDeschenes Here, for this last post, I want to thank the team of Der Greif for their curiosity, their involvement and support to photographers. thank you, Anne-Camille A.