Denis Prisset

French realism

4 - 28 March 2000

"Marseille - Grenoble - Paris - Valence - Lille: a set of photographs from each of these cities.

In the history of photography there is a tradition of portraying territories: Merville, Atget, the American landscape artists, W. Evans... The historian and the critic look for a reason, a motivation for this representation. For the photographer, there is a moment when the only motivation at play is the desire to represent. This desire, in order not to become too arbitrary, is then circumscribed to a territory. The artist invests this inclination in an identifiable project, for himself and for others. The interest is in sticking with this contradiction and in attributing to the result the status of realism.

The desire to describe fixes itself on objects and produces images that can themselves be described, compared, evaluated.

It is the particular attention to this process that partly motivates this project; how do images appear when the reasons and mechanisms of their production are consciously reduced. "

Denis Prisset