ROBERT FRANK (Switzerland, 1924),
MARC TRIVIER (Belgium, 1960)
The photonic tone
1. The reverberating timbre: Robert Frank
In every Robert Frank photo, there is a matte cymbal sound, already in
the themes or the motifs. It can be a large American flag, half of which
already covers a good half of the show, horizontally or vertically. It can be
the hood of a car engrossing the night. Or still, in Bar of Gallup New
Mexico (*CP, 32), the powerful contrast between the monumental back of a character standing on
the right of the foreground and a gap where – in a now-distant background
– we glimpse at other cowboys facing us. In this case, there is even a
violent rolling of the ensemble in relation to the horizontal of the frame.
The texture of the photonic imprint is of the same type as the themes. We
see no massive blacks like in the work of Alvarez-Bravo, Bill Brandt, Eugene
Smith, but rather, shadows like we find with Peter Henry Emerson and Paul
Strand, with the difference that this time, the shadows do not give way to an
equal becoming towards the obscuring or towards lightening, but hit lights and
resound, whilst the lights hit them and resound in turn. This double resonance
does not engender continuous gradations, but timbre effects, i.e. luminous
partials of variable intensity. Speaking of photonic cymbal strokes is hardly a
metaphor.
Hence, the place, with its intro-reverberation – that Brassaï had
obtained through his spatial, logical, psychological chiasms, or that he had
reached through balls and rolls until the large body of the night – is now
produced by multi-dimensional impacts of energies of various orientation and
sources, whose the night is the warm and vibrant matrix. In other words, the
place depends on the ambiance, with its something vague, its manner of ire
ambo, of going in different directions at once. Like the photographer himself in his divagation.
A photograph taken in London in 1952 registers the nuances of the timbre that a back, black (or at least dark), opened car door inflicts to the rainy grays of the road, the
facades, the evanescent passers-by (CP, 90-91). However, Robert Frank will not
blossom in England, but in the United States, where he immigrates in 1947.
There, things and being already and always have the forces of radiance that his
photographic timbre calls for. Reading the famous book, Les Américains published in Paris in 1958, we could in a first while think about some sociology with the usual questions of richness and poverty, happiness and unhappiness, or the originality or insignificance of the individual. However, if there is sociology, it consists in recognizing that here, the individuals
are above and foremost the places where they move (we are not saying: where
they live).
Thereby, Restaurant U.S.1 leaving Columbia (**CP, 44-45) – even
though we do not see anyone – is beforehand haunted. The chairs, the
table, the fan are such that, not on them but against them, the photons that entered the room through the window bounce in every direction to give the crossed resonances and the timbres that set the ambiance. The only person visible appears on the screen of the television,
which is turned on. Apart from that, the television is everywhere, because the
day glows against the table and the Thonnet chairs are of the same oval than
the screen.
We should even press this symbol. To see a place as the result of
crossed luminous timbres, it is essential that we should be able to move among
the lights in the light emitted, hence the television light and not in the
cinematographic, reflected light. For Walker Evans – before television
– the light still reflected on things, which had the valorist density of
‘Heideggerian’ utensils. For televisual Robert Frank, it splatters to the point
that it emanates, only retaining an ambiance that volatilizes the utensility.
More precisely, we are in the fifties, and television is more often that not in
black and white. As we see in Bar, New York City (CP, 10-11) with its reptilian forms, it is the entire structure, which, in Frank’s work, follows the black and white televisual texture, with its tentacular viscosities.
The pure ambiance, this mixture of presence and a lot of absence, from
which Frank obtains the photographic equivalent is not a sophisticated
experience, it is even the simplest of experiences, the one that anyone
drinking coffee in their local bar or at home in their favourite armchair can
live. Proust wanted to demonstrate the mechanism of that experience when, in
his last book, he questions what ultimately gives the human being an urge to go
forth. He responds, according to his definition of homosexuality (being another
same) that it is memorising superimpositions: the X beach on the Y church on
the Z face, etc. To the same question, in another era, with an ethos of
heterosexual compenetration and fecundity, in a light redefined by black and
white television, Frank’s uterine photos respond that one can live for the
ambiance of photonic timbres that are so much more compenetrating that they are
impure, filled with noise. Apart from that, they are also memorizing, according
to a present that is already in the memory.
2. The diffusive tone: Marc Trivier
The fact that Marc Trivier made a Portrait of Robert Frank (***) is not the only pretext for discussing him here. There is in both men, despite the great age difference,
similar ways of settling in the photonic dust and subordinating the structure
to the texture as in the work of Avedon, while taking from this party not an
atomization, but timbre effects, and simultaneously mixtures of cosmologic
fervour and desperation. Both oppose magmas and plasmas to the atoms of Avedon
and to the cells of Arbus. However, whilst Robert Frank goes straight to the
core of things, Trivier, like Avedon, likes going straight to the body, even to
the face. But as an abandon, a flow. Until the supreme flow, the outlook.
Introducing an individuated organism into this type of cosmological
leeway supposes long tracks, friendly and tense cohabitations. To set ideas,
let us evoke the protocol to which we were subjected in 1983, but we have to
say that since, it has incurred a few variants. At the first contact, the press
book played a propaedeutic (Webster) role. ‘Here is Francis Bacon, Burroughs, etc. Here is (implied) the defeat, the de-doing, that is expected of you’. The camera was a Rolleyflex that was supposed to thwart the mastery of the photographer at the last moment. The abandonment to this
third-included on its tripod was even more destabilizing that its state of
disrepair was subject to comments (it will die for good after capturing Jean
Genet). The self-timer was finishing placing the associates ‘where there was no
longer time’, the prey having been warned that when the click sound was hear,
it was not that ‘it’ had a place but that ‘it’ was going to occur a few seconds
later – perhaps ten seconds – at a moment that would escape the
protagonists. Considering this ‘husteron proteron’, the cosmos-world would lose
its footing, opening the universe. During the timeless wait, some incantatory
shakings communicated to the Rolleyflex would complete the levitation. In the
end, the portrayed had the impression of being shot ten years after he had
died. In any event, a long while after he had rejoined the indifference and
beatitude of the stars.
The cows, which Marc Trivier regularly photographed at the Anderlecht abattoirs, show the same
essence as the human faces (****). An essence that is no longer the turmoil
encountered with Avedon, but more of a souvenir of Georges Bataille’s
‘continuous’, occasionally invoked by the photographer, dissolving from every
side the pretenses of emergence of the ‘discontinuous’ and whose here the
matter is the light, the vaporized milk of the light. The fact that he was born
on the Meuse at the epitome of the combats of both world wars, where his
childhood encountered the mass graves through the semi-historical,
semi-fictional tales of former generations probably intervenes in this
grasp-construction where Fiction and Reality neutralize each other sufficiently
to well up the Real.
Merging faraway and near historicities reminds us of post-modernism. And it is true that with
Trivier, like with Suda, we have once again reached a very different attitude
to the modernism of the 1950-1975, and that we will regularly encounter.
In the photonic timbre, photography, a very thin texture, has found one of its major virtualities. It is one of the aspects where it artistically overflows, because the strokes in
painting are too wide to trigger a veritable visual timbre. Pointillism went
down that road but was stopped in its tracks by the pictorial touch.
Henri Van Lier
A photographic history of photography
in Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 1992
List of abbreviations of common references:
CP: Special issue of “Cahiers de Photographie” dedicated to the relevant photographer.
The acronyms (*), (**), (***) refer to
the first, second, and third illustration of the chapters, respectively. Thus,
the reference (*** AP, 417) must be interpreted as: “This refers to the third
illustration of the chapter, and you will find a better reproduction, or a
different one, with the necessary technical specifications, in The Art of
Photography listed under
number 417”.