Polaroids SX 70
Fiber paper print from digital source .
Size: 120 x 70 cm


This series, which I first called On Earth, is a work in progress. One of the photographs, Light Years, captures the spirit of the series: looking at our world from a distance. A long distance from the familiar: friends on a beach, a loved one's face in the wind.

Filtered, as it were, by memory, time or imagination, the landscape and the people in it are immobilized. Their immobility takes them out of their surroundings. They are absent from the strong light of the present.

The atmosphere portrayed in these images is theatrical, with lighting that is composed, dramatic, illuminating exteriors as if they were interiors. The world is lit like a stage set, and the Earth is an experimental space where plausible fictions unfold.

But the images of Long Distance are also closely related to cinematic space: photography saves from perdition the fragments of a film that is so alive, but that vanishes over time - even as it is being projected. Isn't that what it means to divide up the world? The pictures take shape, in the form of diptychs and triptychs, more or less disjointed sequences of  shadowy photographs. Rooms that vibrate with emptiness. Emptiness: that is what determined my decision to work in true black and white, for the first time. Color will return, later on. Second voice.

After One Time Only and The Suite d'Arles, new sculptures appear in Long Distance. But these forms have no relation to clothing or books. Their purely abstract shapes indicate the juncture of place and time, like those traps that the Indians call dreamcatchers.