Alain Willaume Expands Documentary Photography
Vulnerable at FIAF Gallery
By Haleh Anvari
Giant black and white portraits of two men hang on FIAF gallery’s far wall. One of the men is ominously masked in white cloth. Is he a member of a political sect? Is he a pilgrim in Spain? The other, an Asian man, clasps his hands together close to his grimacing face. Is he praying? Is he cold? On another wall, a military man has his hands up in the air. Is he surrendering to the enemy? Is he guiding a vehicle in? What are the crowds in the next photograph waiting for? Their stillness and shared focus creates a sense that something is about to happen, but what? Alain Willaume’s photographs are deliberately ambiguous.
A veteran of documentary photography, Willaume makes photographs that may appear random, but they are not accidental. Although he captures unmediated moments in public spaces, he vehemently rejects the label of street photography, a genre made prominent by such luminaries as his fellow Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson in the 1950s, two decades before a teenaged Willaume began his career. Both photographers are humanists, but Willaume rejects Cartier- Bresson’s famous “Decisive Moment,” where form and action collide in a serendipitous instant. Willaume’s eye searches instead for the pausal moments within the action, and the liminal sensation created when the photographic codes we are accustomed to, are not provided.
We are, even if we are not aware of it, experts in deciphering embedded visual codes in documentary photography that help us find context and locate a geography in the images we are viewing. But with Willaume, we are left wondering and somewhat wrong-footed. Something has either happened and we missed it or it’s about to happen and we don’t know what it is. This vague suggestion of action, evident only by its absence, creates a captivating sense of unease.
In this way, Willaume expands the boundaries of documentary photography, offering the viewer questions instead of answers.
Françoise Hébel, the curator of the show, who for many years acted as the director of the prestigious annual photography festival, Rencontres d’Arles, refers to his installation of Willaume’s images as a fresco. He has intermeshed works selected across 12 projects, into a collage instead of a linear narrative of the artist’s career. The majority of the photographs are pasted directly onto the stark red walls of the gallery without frames, forgoing the conventional methods of display. Overlapping here and there in small clusters, some images are enlarged to the point where the grain in the film has become as prominent as the composition of the photograph, providing background texture for another photograph pasted on top.
Hébel is championing Willaume’s style as part of a new movement in French photography that he calls the French Protocol. He refers to Willaume as a “slow traveler,” who spends months and years on his subjects, unlike news photographers who jump into the action and leave as quickly as they arrive. By creating time and space around his subjects, Willaume avoids the easy clichés that are associated with documentary photography. His work, in turn, requires time to be read and understood.
Nowadays, when everyone is a candid photographer of the minutiae of their own lives and has become habituated to new codes of instant, vanishing images, Willaume calls us to stop and ponder, to discover his measured and intellectual take on the world.
