Antoine Gonin - Arles Festival 2013

Gonin's exhibition is from his series entitled "Empreinte". I have chosen it to comment on because  I don't really understand it. I found the following on his web-site www.antoinegonin.com that offers an explanation.

"His “Empreinte’ series marks the coming together of his landscape work. Free of any documentary-like intention, it lends itself freely to a hallmark of a much more personal nature, and is host to many abstract, graphical and poetic compositions which together reveal the mark that human activity has left on nature. Thus, his pictures are at once the imprint of how man has modified the landscape, and the singular nature of his regard."

One image in the series is titled "Oregon 1 United States 2012".  At first sight it is a black and white image of white lines of varying curvature against a black background. There is no discernible pattern nor structure to the white lines and it was only when I applied the knowledge that this was a landscape image that I came to the conclusion that the lines are traces of wheel tracks across a field. At this point I found my previous knowledge kicking in as I found that I wanted to know how big the field (or part of a field) was that I was looking at. I was trying to make sense of what I saw by fitting the image into a framework that I understood. I find that this is my usual reaction to abstract work. Rather than seeing it for itself I want to impose my world onto the image.

In his book "Camera Lucida" p7 (Barthes Roland (1980) Translation edition (2000) London Vintage) Roland Barthes writes of his desire to be "a primitive, without culture" when trying to discover the essence of the Photograph. When looking at a photograph our culture, our prior knowledge, acts as a filter between our 'looking' and our 'seeing'. This is what happens with all photographs but for me and probably others when what we are looking at does not fit into any previous known structure we try to force it into a known framework. By becoming a 'primitive' we have no prior knowledge, no culture so that we see the image as itself. In practice this is very difficult if not impossible because our culture provides us with a language that not only allows us to think about the image but also to explain it to others. Is it possible to understand without language? If I talk to an expert about this image and ask him what he 'sees' he can only communicate with me in a common language that is a product of our common culture.

I say earlier in the blog that the quotation from his web site "offers an explanation". I doubt if it does.