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Sans titre
1981-1982
Black and white photograph, gelatin-silver print
11.7 x 18 cm
Purchased in: 1985
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Arnaud Claass’s early photographic works date back to the 1970s and refer, both subject-wise (city streets and buildings in the United States) and by virtue of their realism, to the proposals declared by American ‘new documentary photography’ of the 1950s and 1960s.
This heritage, which he lays claim to, is above all present in his quest for a photography that is right, and relevant. His images do not conjure up memorable events, but rather the evidence concealed by everything upon which his sensitive eye comes to rest. The motifs of vegetation, which he photographed in 1979 or thereabouts, saturate the space of the image, and tally with this desire to sidestep any kind of narrative. ‘Photography does not compose, it frames. It does not construct a set of bits and pieces, it accepts a relation’. In this proposal, Arnaud Claass suggests this paradoxical relation that exists in his photographs somewhere between the fixedness peculiar to the medium and the impermanence of a nature that is invariably paced by the succession of the seasons.
Shown in an intimist format, Arnaud Claass’s concentrated landscapes establish a proper distance with the viewer, which gives rise to things being tamed. These poetic frames encourage the contemplation of an everyday nature, undifferentiated, and detailed at every turn by the light, while the specific quality of the close-up, tending towards abstraction, affords us access to the rustling and seething of this vegetation.
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diaporama