The exhibition project “Kritzendorf Between Two Floods” must be situated within a dual perspective: that of vernacular photography (that is, the trace of a collective history such as Walker Evans sought to capture), and that of a reflection on photography as an object, in continuity with André Bazin’s thinking on the ontology of the photographic image (which posits an ongoing link between the object and its representation)

Film Photography and the Imprint

Since resuming my photographic practice in 2013 after a twenty-year interruption, I have reflected extensively on film as a medium and on the limits of digital imagery in the context of archival photography, or of any image intended to belong to the lineage of testimonial photographs (from postcards to photojournalism), which finds a cinematic counterpart in the documentary work of the Lumière brothers.

Long before the advent of new technologies (digital images captured by cameras or generated by image-producing systems), I had grown accustomed to considering photography as a form of imprint — the trace of the spatiotemporal presence of a real thing that has now disappeared. Whether or not that presence is truly effective (it is not, strictly speaking, since what is captured is not the object itself but the photons registered by the device) mattered little to me: something had indeed become embedded in a layer of gelatin, and that was enough. At least as much as in Bazin, I found myself in Barthes’ idea of a foundational dimension of the photographic, summed up in the phrase “that-has-been”: “the photograph,” he writes in Camera Lucida, “is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, radiations have issued which ultimately touch me, who am here.” Everyone likely needs a portable dogma, an unquestioned axiom. Mine lay in that fragile link between my presence here and now and the ghosts trapped on a sensitive surface, fixed for eternity.

In this respect, images produced by digital devices posed a problem for me. Certainly, the method of capture (a mechanical tool allowing light to be directed toward a surface capable of exploiting it) remains the same, but the nature of the sensor introduces a break in the link with the captured object: no bodies seized, no hoofprints in the sand attesting to a horse’s passage, but bodies decomposed and then recomposed by the algorithm. No ghosts, therefore — little presence, even illusory.

As I write this, I think of Serge Daney’s absent father, a possible extra in some highly hypothetical film, whose body, neither alive nor dead, would wander in cinema’s limbo. “I must have spent my life,” he writes, “knowing that he was somewhere, engraved, embedded, embalmed in the black-and-white films of the interwar years, and fearing that I might one day come across him — his celluloid face, his dead eyes that would see me.”

This is why I refuse to take digital photographs. I must be too Bazinian to confuse the hyperreal world of Avalon with the stream of workers captured by the Lumière brothers’ camera. My question is not whether the world offered to our gaze is more or less manipulated by digital tools, or even entirely invented by an ever more powerful AI, but whether something has truly been captured — not by the camera itself, but by the film, by the photosensitive emulsion that preserves, if not the effective presence of tangible reality, at least the photonic imprint of what has been.

Photography and Traces of the Past

For the past ten years, I have resumed work that I had abandoned in 1994, when I sold my cameras to devote myself to music. The theatre photographer I was at the time has been replaced by a family archivist obsessed with the foreseeable disappearance of people and places. A childhood at risk, changing faces — I archived all of this while thinking about failing memory and the memories that must be preserved. The places I passed through gradually took on increasing importance, beginning with Kritzendorf, which, timeless though it may seem, quietly watched generations pass through holiday homes closed during the winter.

To French friends, I described this resort — founded in 1903 to allow the poor and schoolchildren to benefit from the health-giving influence of bathing — as a model of Vienna’s socialist policy, which has long sought to preserve an art of living together. Where other idyllic landscapes have been privatized and reserved for a few fortunate owners keen to restrict access, Kritzendorf has remained a place open to all, accessible by train, a model of social diversity.

The idea of exhibiting the results of this work gained meaning following the floods of 2024. What had seemed stable, destined for a kind of quiet eternity, suddenly disappeared. Pebble beaches, lawns, gardens — all were covered by a thick layer of mud that transformed the landscape. The event was certainly foreseeable in a flood-prone area, and no doubt had occurred before, yet these floods echoed the fragility of this environment, which — whether through climate change or a political shift toward a society of every person for themselves — could ultimately vanish.

The exhibition “Kritzendorf Between Two Floods” simply seeks to leave a lasting trace of what is destined to disappear and to underscore the social importance of keeping its spirit alive.