Corinne Janier
La dérive
Rennes, Lendroit, 2001
offset, p&b
12 x 6 cm
180 p.
ISBN 978-2-917427-00-2
“Those who live to the drift are not all poets, but the poets all live adrift”
“At first almost nothing. The convergence of coincidences that I like to think drifting : a lot of old photos, some of which remained at the stage of contact prints, that a friend Clémentine has found on a flea market stall. Then the founded magic in this family images probably passed on the French coast between 1930 and 1940 : kids in vintage swimwear playing on the beach, family portraits together on a rock, prestigious interior views just before the meal, smiles stolen from the deck of a sailboat at the sea… Later then, some of the prints were hypothetically attributed to the German artist Germaine Krull, regularly solicited during this time, i’ve been told, for orders of this type from wealthy French families.
But when I extract from this set, the image of this diver, I wasn’t yet aware of this expertise. At the moment of its discovery, I felt the need to appropriate myself of this photo, which no doubt I would have loved to be the author. From the only print contact (cause I couldn’t find the original negative), I reproduced, expanded and multiplied it.
This body that seemed to have been trimmed to the surface of the this black sea, frozen in the trajectory of its plunge into the ominous silence of a black and white landscape, attracted me and it echoes in my photographic concerns.
First its generic nature : it seemed as if we had wanted to draw a diver above the sea, it would have made this image. Then its disturbing strangeness related to this body that we don’t know the face, in that sea where we can’t see the horizon, to this movement stopped in his tracks whose fall seems latent and inevitable.
The body crosses the water’s surface. The sea opens and the produced shock breaks the silence of this peaceful setting for a summer afternoon. Or maybe not…”
Corinne Janier
Lyon, October 2007
https://www.corinnejaniercolombel.com/edition
http://www.lendroit.org/catalogue/fiches/73-La-derive