Georges Didi-Huberman, To get out of the grey , text published in the crossind édited by jeu de Paume and point du jour

Paris, 17th July 2013

Dear Mathieu Pernot,

Today I am rereading the first letter I believe you ever sent me. It is still tucked inside your book on the Saliers camp which you had sent with it. The time has come, no doubt, to give you something of a more serious answer than I have given you to date. The years have gone by, and I have frequently come across your work, stopping over it here or there, to the extent that it has inscribed itself and nested in my own way of looking at a wall, a door, a window, a cloud, a cry or a Gypsy’s face. The years have passed over my first impression, felt in 2005 in particular at the exhibition in the Vu gallery, and those passing years have patiently reinforced and sharpened it. I will explain this to you first of all in a phrase that comes to me spontaneously, and this will be my intuitive way of telling you my sense that your photographs—whether “in colour” or “black and white”, as is sometimes so awkwardly said—arouse, or are carried by, something like a desire to get out of the grey. While I emphasise it, this expression is not yet precise, despite its having to do with something other than pure and simple photographic aesthetics, something other than a plain consideration of contemporary art. I would indeed like to understand why images such as your own arouse—or are carried by—such a desire, to get out of the grey.

*

Grey. Grey like the concrete walls or the closed doors of the prisons that you photographed a lot, particularly between 2001 and 2002. But already, I believe, in almost every one of those images the possibility of getting out of the grey gave a horizon of expectations, a horizon of hope (or of anger). The door is closed tight, but an inscription indicates what is beyond the vertical plane that faces us: “waiting room”, “courtyard” or even that promise contained in the word “dischargeable”. Which is a way of saying that movement was possible in spite of the visible impasse, in spite of the obstacle locked twice.1 In the series entitled Promenades (Walks) we discovered spatiality particular to the painful paradox of the obligation of prisoners to “go for a walk” in the very place which they would not, under any circumstances, be able to get out of, or get themselves out of.2 One of these images, for example, shows the obsidional and despairing walls of an exercise yard placed in the “isolation block” of the prison in Toulouse (fig. 1): a grey wall in front and on the two sides, grey wire fencing on top, as though the prison administration were afraid that the prisoners might manage to fly away (the strong desire to escape might make this possible, who knows). Our gaze, confronted by this image, seems to have no way out. The ‘exercise yard’ is no more than a slightly bigger cell or cage, and yet your photographic work had very attentively sought to grasp this grey fence with—or even through—all of the visible, and in a sense sovereign, signs of the great desire to get out of the grey: a football, above, scoffs at all of this imposed immobility; the word “revolution” engraved on the wall in front challenges all of this subservience to the prison rules. Finally, weeds have grown at the bottom: we see them, in the photo, as grey as the grey of the concrete, but we know that in reality they come out of the grey, that they get out of the grey of the ground as a possibility of natural life, of obstinate life breathing in the sunlight. It is a breakaway whose movement is so slow—and that is the trick—that it will undoubtedly have escaped the notice of the prison guards themselves.

*

You did it again, but this time in colours, in the series of photographs entitled Mauvaises Herbes (Weeds), created in the exercise yards of the “upper part” of the Santé prison in Paris (fig. 2). The French expression mauvaises herbes (meaning “weeds” but literally “bad grass”), or mauvaise graine (meaning “a bad lot or seed”), was probably in your mind when you used it to refer to those children who did not “sprout” as they should have, for one reason or another, and who regularly end up between the grey walls of a prison like this one. What your images show is once again that dramaturgy of space that starts out from restriction, I mean that seeks to leave it, to get out of it: barbed wire on the left, bricks and fencing on the right, concrete straight ahead. The ground is also of concrete. But the concrete itself is cracked under the very slow and sovereign force of the rootlets, the weeds, those mauvaises herbes, the rhizomes, and I don’t know what else. And what your image shows, finally, is the surprising contrast—a drama, a frozen dialectics—between a very baroque life on the one hand, a life made of boughs, foliage, gramitations, creeper effects, splendours of disorder, everything that is getting out of the grey, constraint, misery, asphalt, fencing or concrete, and which, finally, turns this abandoned courtyard into something almost luxurious and joyous, or at least into something impertinent in the eyes of what contains it. I thought, looking at your image, of the way in which Georges Bataille, under the heading “Dictionnaire” in the journal Documents, had briefly grasped— astounded—the question of space. The word space belongs no doubt to the great philosophical paradigms (ah! the “metaphysical exposition” of the concept of space in the “transcendental aesthetics” of Immanuel Kant . . .), but it is at the moment when it shows itself to be roguish, as Bataille put it, that it is worth being reassessed: “One must not be surprised that the mere utterance of the word space should bring in philosophical protocol. Philosophers, being masters of ceremonies of the abstract universe, have shown how space must behave in any circumstances. Unfortunately, space has remained roguish and it is difficult to list what it has engendered. It is discontinuous in the same way as one is a crook, to the despair of its philosopher-dad. . . . Space breaks continuity de rigueur [even if it] would do better, of course, to do its duty and create the philosophical idea in the apartments of professors! Obviously nobody would think of putting the professors in prison to teach them what space is (the day when, for example, the walls will crumble before the fences of their confines).”3 Undoubtedly, nobody would have thought to approach the question of space through the ‘example’, as Bataille put it, of a prison whose walls had crumbled for no foreseeable reason. Yet this idea did come to the author of Histoire de l’œil (Story of the Eye), but not as any surrealist or even provocative idea: it came to him as an image, and moreover as a photograph taken from the Keystone agency to document, and I quote the caption reused by Bataille, the “collapse of a prison in Colombus (Ohio, USA)”4 (fig. 3). Since we are not told why the walls of this prison collapsed, we can imagine that the ‘invasive species’ might have ended up—at the end of an extremely slow but obstinate process of the roots—undermining or ruining the interior of all the architectural structures of the Columbus prison, making them implode.

*

We could thus get out of the grey by means of a slow radicular implosion, by mining the restrictive terrain. But there are other implosions in your photographic work: these are, of course, all those blocks of flats—grey concrete—declared obsolete, which demolition companies implode in the suburbs of our large cities. Spectacular events that you photograph “in black and white”, as though the clearing of the immense grey clouds actually exploded the grey of the architectural concrete. Grey on grey or, rather, grey against grey since it is a visual battlefield upon which, if we think about it, certain inherent conflicts in our con- temporary societies are fused. You have, here again, dialectalized all things, since, in your book Le Grand Ensemble (The High-Rise Estate), you alternate these images in grisaille with a series of coloured postcards of the same blocks of flats, destined, forty years later, to be ruined by implosion.5 In one of these photographs of implosions (fig. 4), the architecture of the large groups of buildings has been completely pushed to the side and almost erased. The magnificent grey and white curls have taken up all the space. And they rhyme visually (they are, in every case, fractal structures) with the clumps of trees that we can see on the right of the image, as though the whirls of dust were working with the plant forms to suggest that force is not always on the side of concrete and steel. Moreover, all of this implodes or explodes in the clear indifference of your large foreground, which is the calm flow of the river—the Seine, since this is in Mantes-la-Jolie—and its deserted bank. It is as though a certain physical life—a fluid, atmospheric plant life—had waited for things to finally get out of the grey, even at the price of turning all large social institutions upside down.

*

It is, however, not about “nature” and its reign over the course of things. Not at all, and even less about anything apocalyptic in telluric forms punishing mankind by a return to the pure forces of the physical world. It has, in fact, to do with our history and our contemporary societies. But where, in these photographs, have human beings actually gone? We must answer this question by saying that they are at the same time in the centre and in the margins. They are at the centre of the grey, but they are there too in order to get out of it. They are at the centre because it is around them that are built the walls and the doors of the prison, the cells and the walkways, the fencing and the barbed wire. It is in order to enclose them and to keep watch on them that all of these panoptics were built. Elsewhere, it was in order to house them that all of these concrete flats were built. We see them only in the Grand Ensemble as microscopic details of those postcards that you brought together: we then notice that they were mostly black and white photographs upon which ran wefts of coloured impressions. This creates something like a humanity which, even if it is in the centre of the large blocks of flats, will be merely dotted, hinted at (and what is most “human” in all of this is the collection of texts that are moving, funny or enigmatic, and are also merely “dotted” or “hinted at”, that you found on the back of each postcard6). The question regarding the prisons is certainly a more prickly one. The prisoners are, obviously, at the centre of the establishment that handles their confinement. But, dear Mathieu, you are very careful to state, in your interview from 2004 “Les prisons photographiques” (photographic prisons), that the penal establishment did not give you permission to photograph the detainees in spite of any eventual agreement given by the interested parties themselves.7 As though the well-known “image right” of private persons stopped too at the prison doors. What is left then to photograph of the prison humanity, except a humanity in traces, in feeble signals, in graffiti, in vestiges of invisible actions . . . Here is what you said in 2004 about the Portes (Doors) and Promenades (Walks) series: “What counts in the photos is what we do not see, what remains on the outside of the image. . . . But if the images do not show us detainees directly, they record the visible signs, the clues left by those we do not see. The walls of the exercise yards are thus dotted with graffiti, drawings, messages written by the detainees. They are genuine sensitive surfaces, spaces of inscription allowing them to lay down their presence here, to record the fact that one day, one place, they passed through. To cut a few words into the stone or the concrete is an act that is very close to photographic recording: it is a way of leaving a trace, of saying that ‘it was’ or ‘I was there’. Often, moreover, the detainees inscribe a name, a date or a place as though they wished to write the caption for a photograph that would never be created.”8 You were constructing, therefore, a certain analogy between prison graffiti and the making of photographs. You remarked, however, a few lines later, that the systems of prison surveillance analysed by Michel Foucault are, significantly, contemporaneous with the invention of photography.9 And elsewhere you gave a lot of thought to those “anthropometric records” imposed on the Gypsies, notebooks in which the photographic framing is nothing other than a particular aspect of the multiple procedures by which a State apparatus strives to make a whole population enter into the grey, whatever their particular differences, their customs, their temporalities, their colours. I am not at all trying to suggest, my dear Mathieu Pernot, that you are contradicting yourself. By invoking both photography as a procedure of surveillance (like Bertillon’s in the police headquarters or Charcot’s at the Salpêtrière hospital) and photography as a way out of surveillance (through your analogy with graffiti), you merely show the double face, the double possibility harboured by any creation of images. There is no ontology possible for photography (“it’s this” or “it’s that”), nor any universal morals (“it’s good” or “it’s bad”). There is only a multiplicity of use values responding to choices that can be completely opposite with regard to their ethical reasons and their aesthetic results. Moreover, what goes for images is also the case for words and for everything else: everything depends on what you do with them. The same language, the same basic grammatical structure, numerous words in common, and yet on the one hand you had Joseph Goebbels trying to stop you from thinking with his words of order, and on the other hand Walter Benjamin allowing you to think with his anxious phrases and his poetics of requirement.

*

Since you are a photographer, everything depends in particular on what you do with the framing. I am thinking, of course, of your series of windows (the Fenêtres) in which everything seems to open up and get out, which is exactly the opposite of what your prison doors (the Portes), at least at a first glance, show us. I am thinking, above all, of your work over many years on the question of identity photos. On the one hand, you devoted a lot of very patient energy—I mean that it was both painful and that it had to become linked over a long period, between 1998 and 2006—to those “anthropometric identity records” to which the Gypsies have been subjected in France (today, under a different name) ever since the law promulgated in 1912 on the “practice of itinerant professions and circulation of nomads”.10 You yourself have told about your plunge—something that no single historian before you had managed to do—into the documents kept in the Departmental Archives of the Bouches-du-Rhône département upon which the camp of Saliers depended administratively and into which, between 1942 and 1944, some seven hundred Gypsies were packed.11 You thus began by bringing to the surface that photographic material—those documents on the barbarity—in order to give them a completely opposite use value, a value of reunion or recognition, and no longer of discrimination or indifference. It is in this way that you oriented all of your artistic work towards the “other side” of this documentation. A photographic use against photographic use: you carefully brought about the possibility of accusing this policing documentation, and at the same time of using it for your own purposes, which concerned finding the survivors of the camp (no simple matter, since they were nomads). And so you genuinely succeeded in making all of these faces get out of the grey of times past; you found them and were able to pick up, more justly, your camera to create portraits of these people. You gave them back their names as actors in our contemporary history. You recorded their words, their stories, their testimonies. You retraced their paths and their travels. You gave the possibility of comparing the images of the Saliers site in 1942 with the images taken by you in 1999 and 2000.12 That indeed is a way of changing the framing. Of making images dialectical, and thereby making all of these people—confined in Saliers during the war and kept, afterwards, within marginality and indifference—get out of the grey. By making them get out of their state of relative invisibility, you placed them back in the centre of your discourse. The Gypsies (Tsiganes) from the region of Arles—who you came across by chance when you were a student at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie—little by little became your friends. They were not, in 1998, merely a “passing” subject. Nor are they so today, for you continue to work with them, and not only to make “art”. If art itself is to reach the heights of our expectations, it must be able to change its scope (that is to say migrate outside of the territory called “art”, which is something you achieve remarkably by working in the fields of historical research or with so-called “non- governmental” organisations).