"Sifnos, Grèce, 1961"

pigment-based inkjet print on baryta

signed, titled, dated and numbered (ink) on verso

Henri Cartier-Bresson has been a model for many of those who approached photography in the eighties and for whom the compulsory figures of the decisive moment, the balanced composition and the black border around the print - proof of non- crop - were the only guarantors of a "successful" photograph.
At a time where Photoshop allows everybody to make up for any type of failure and to manipulate the image at will, these precepts may seem rather odd. As if to prove it by contradiction, everything that represents the decisive moment has been erased from a selection of images. Trop tôt, trop tard (Too Early, Too Late), the title of the series, has been borrowed from a film by Straub and Huillet that tells historical facts solely through long tracking shots on the road and the landscape.
Establishing a different relationship to time, the result delivers a new reading of the French master’s work. It highlights a choice of topographical settings related to very specific points of view, stresses the geometry of the compositions and invites us to imagine Cartier-Bresson’s wanderings, searching for the perfect place and the right moment to press the button. Finally, the world of Cartier-Bresson reconstructed this way gives off a strange feeling of lonelyness.
(Isabelle Le Minh)