Valérie Jouve
Entre les images - Installation - 2020
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 22
Installation
The installation I have chosen to show in the Panorama 22 exhibition at Le Fresnoy stems from a desire that I began to express a few years ago. Many filmmakers tell me that they don’t understand photography, because it’s stuck in a frozen time. For example, Bruno Dumont ironically wondered how anyone could “still do Photography nowadays, when with cinema you can get 24 images per second.”
This made me mad! Although I didn’t have the repartee to come up with a quick answer in the middle of our more general conversation. However, it is in effect essentially a question of temporality, and I think it may be interesting, in our frenetic world where we absolutely insist getting back (after the pandemic) to the way it was before, to that frantic rhythm that was starting to make everyone ill (even before the pandemic), to go on trying to stop time and contemplate the world. And today, if I may sometimes make films (above all long travelling shots), I always come back to this tool that allows me to capture the real, a density of reality for an indefinite time, which for the viewer will stop only when she chooses. Taking the time…
The large-format view camera that I use to make the most of my images reflects this same need, to take the time, to look, to observe, to explore around my subject before I even put down my tripod and produce images. In fact, I do not make many images, just the ones I need.
That is why I will show photographs here, in the form of posters (blue back paper stuck on the wall like a screening area) on which three projections will dialogue, each one articulating one of the issues of our time, in closed spaces without “perspectives,” endless tracking shots and repeated rotating images. A perfect world!
Valérie Jouve
The French photographer and filmmaker Valérie Jouve was born in Saint-Etienne in 1964. She currently lives between Paris and the Aveyron (southwest France). A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, Jouve studied sociology before she decided to devote herself to photography.
