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Philippe Dubois
If there has been one characteristic trait in the development of photographic creation in Europe over the last twenty years, it is indubitably that of a crossbreeding of images. This crossbreeding has meant that one can no longer even speak about photography today as a specific and exclusive practice, specifically pigeon-holed and closed off from the rest by a sense of pseudo-purism which would in the end be sterile and autarchic and run the risk of dangerous aesthetic ostracism. Perhaps images are like races, with crossbreeding becoming the means of ensuring renovation for perpetuating their existence, or at least as a way of breathing more fully and freely, of attaining a sort of rebirth in order to participate in an increasingly open, diversified creativity. In any event, it certainly seems that for some time, photography "as such" (but what is that really?) has felt straight jacketed in its rigid framework and it has increasingly openly peered out onto various other fields. Be it from desire or constraint, photography has done this to afford it an additional dimension, to be able to see and to survive. One can see this in the mere photographing of cinematographic objects (shots from films or television, for instance); one can see it more spectacularly in the dynamic use of all sorts of topographical strategies to bring about a cinema-like presentation of photographs in installations or environments; one can see this in the confrontational jumping from one support to another, in both directions, without making any major distinction between them (photographers who become film-makers, or vice-versa, or electromagnetic photographs). One can see this -depending on the procedures or the case the figures here are even more subtle because they are more interiorised- via the format (for instance print-runs of photographs with the size, and therefore the grain, texture, etc., of an image from cinema projected on a screen); one can see this via series or sequences, in other words montage (whether it be used for narrative, plastic or critical purposes). One can see this in the obsession with time and recording movement in pictures (the blur of movements, swishes, fluttering, etc., leaving visible traces of time passing, lasting movement); one can see this through the relationship between the seizing of space and the broadening of the field of vision (panoramas in photography as panoramic shots in cinema); one can even see this in the inclusion of a mise-en-scene in an isolated shot that creates fiction and induces narrative elements (virtual, suspended or condensed). In short, whatever form it takes on, it is evident that creative contemporary photography has incessantly proven itself to be haunted by cinema (and to a lesser extent stirred up by images from other technologies) undoubtedly for a long time now, although knowingly and particularly acutely for the last two decades. The phantom or ghost of large moving pictures projected in dark rooms, capturing, due to the fluidness of their fiction, the imagination of fascinated viewers, bamboozled, glued to their seats, is what I feel is one of the great marks that characterises the current situation.
In the framework of a mere article (1), it obviously does not seem possible to me to address all of the issues, and certainly not by means of a full overview of the artists/photographers who, each in his or her own way, have opened up vast fields. So in order to illustrate these different issues I will not be exhaustive, I will not go over a list, artist by artist, period by period, or European country by European country. Rather I will touch upon some fundamental issues, taking an in-depth look at what is involved or at stake in these theoretical stances, giving various examples, chosen totally arbitrarily, without any concern about being balanced, representative or complete. The only point that all of the cases brought out have in common, is that there is always a certain mixing of the photograph with other arts, especially with moving and mechanical images; cinema first and foremost, but also video and sometimes computer generated (so-called "synthesis") images. (…)
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