THE BOOK OF PHANTOMS: VALERIE JOUVE AND THE CRISIS OF THE CONTEMPORARY PORTRAIT

Published in an earlier version in SOMA magazine, December/January, 2002

There is no close-up of the face. The close-up is the face, but the face precisely in so far as it has destroyed its triple function – a nudity of the face much greater than that of the body, an inhumanity much greater than that of animals... But more importantly, the close-up turns the face into a phantom, and the book of phantoms.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema One

Lost In Thought

Valerie Jouve's large scale, color, photographic portraits are about subjects lost in thought, or caught in the middle of an action, but what that is, or what it means, remains opaque. There seems to be a certain reticence in the subjects, they keep a certain distance, or they are turning away. This is a particularly urban solitude that produces strange body movements, such as those that happen to people who don’t experience intimacy over long periods and are then put into an intimate situation – they have to re-learn it. Some of the subjects are thinking silently and keeping it to themselves. Narrative is everywhere (like rocks on the beach, as Barthes described it),[i] but nothing takes hold, nothing solidifies into what illustrators and commercial photographers call a primary narrative.

For most professional photographic portraiture the objective is to continue the traditions inherited from painting and to bring those traditions into the present moment, as if this were a matter of simple transposition of mediums. Those traditions are by now a simple template everyone learns in their first year of art school: to provide the basic data of the subject’s appearance, identity, social station, and sensibility in a single image. When it is successful a portrait may achieve what fiction and philosophy have only dreamed of, or vaguely dared to do, and that is to convey the nuances of a consciousness in the midst of creating itself in the world at large. In conventional portraits the “sitter,” is then subjected to the powerful narrative tropes of specificity - of the world of things and places that enclose the subject not only in her “reality” but in a place that indexes what lies outside the frame. When we look at portraits we then trace the passage of this face through the historical and cultural predicaments of her time. In short every portrait is presumably a vast library of histories, an open book. But how do you learn to read that book?

The subject in photographic portraiture is also a medium as we see how history has flowed through the subject’s body, her being, her presentation, or her mask. We may, for example, look for the sort of significant gestures that "tell a story." These are moments that commercial photographers create on a regular basis with a few carefully chosen props - props that were a part of Rembrandt’s studio as well as David Bailey’s - but in Jouve’s portraits the story never arrives, or perhaps it has yet to arrive, or maybe it arrived and left and we are too late. The ingredients are all present but the narrative refuses to come into focus – it simply leaves us hanging, but to what end?

The photographs are in saturated color and show contemporary figures in urban settings amongst the rings of suburbs that surround the cities of Marseilles, Lyon, and Paris - places where Valerie Jouve has lived and where she finds the primary locations for her work. In her portraits, context is of supreme importance as the landscapes envelop their subjects, and the subjects envelop the landscapes creating a dialogue. This sustained observation, has a phenomenological bent, being concerned, not only with the relationship of the subjects to their immediate environment, but with the ways that perception plays (in every sense) with our understanding of the world and the terms of engagement that we formulate over a lifetime. Valerie Jouve: “What interests me above all else is the question of the handling of space... Above all, it’s a matter of understanding how the figure confers presence on its surroundings. Here architecture is presented as the emblematic form of space that man creates for himself in order to exist.”[i]

The natural and the man-made seem to flow into each other reciprocating an unfinished movement – one does not play second fiddle to the other – they are interpenetrating, and all of this activity seems to have been caught on the fly. This sometimes happens in the films of John Cassavetes, in which the camera stays on actors as they struggle to realize their character past the point that they are embarrassed or feel they need to remember their lines or their blocking. What we see at that point is highly personal, often very awkward mannerisms – at times only embarrassed silence - come to the surface, and the distance between fictional characterizations and the actor's own persona at a certain point disintegrates. These are the moments that both Cassavetes and Jouve cherish.

An Encyclopedia of Gestures

One senses in the photographs a patient meditation on consciousness and time, but as physically manifested in the world rather than as concepts considered through illustrative art or text. How does she do that? Jouve: “My first contact with the history of photography, for example, was when I discovered a book by Avedon that set up a parallel between miners and celebrities. What struck me was this presence of a social reality devoid of analytical perspective and yet full of meaning. This discovery occurred when I was studying sociology. At the time I was taking photographs purely for my research and it so happens that I rejected discourse in favor of the powerful presence of the individual subjects... aesthetics allow you to do without discourse, to present things in all of their complexity”[ii] In the work of Valerie Jouve there is a poetics of description in all of its complexity without "discourse" – an aspect of French art that goes back at least to Edgar Degas, who claimed in his letters the desire to create drawings that would build an encyclopedic series of psychological facial expressions and physiological gestures peculiar to his time.[iii] His whole body of work can in a sense be seen as the introduction to this "encyclopedia" which he envisioned but never made. August Sander tried something similar and Jouve has much in common with their encyclopedic endeavors, with the proviso that the earlier artists were attempting a comprehensive encyclopedia while Jouve’s work is an open-ended book.

Jouve elaborates on her beginnings in photography: “This was 1983 and I was working with a Franco-Algerian association in Lyon on the issue of immigration. In the suburbs of Lyon I was studying a group of about fifteen young people in an attempt to define the characteristics of the Beur generation (North Africans born in France to immigrant parents). The photographs I was taking at the time had no special qualities, they were just visual notes, a reminder for the study. Still, individuals as such were both in and outside the frame of my analysis, just as they were both a part of the group and deeply isolated, in fact. And it seemed to me that Sociology completely failed to take this phenomenon into account, that it was somehow insensitive to anything that was not a human group.”[iv]

With her images Jouve was arguing for a different kind of reality not tied to discourse or to “groups” symbolically occupying a “space,” but to individuals occupying a specific place. In effect her photography was, from the start, anti-academic, offering an alternative vision to her sociology that had "completely failed." A photographic alternative seemed more factual, more real, and most important of all, more responsive to individuals and their environment. Yet photography would seem to have certain shortcomings for dealing with complexity or entanglements, since it simplifies and emphasizes surfaces by default. This is Susan Sontag: “The problem with photography is that…it’s too imperious a way of seeing. Its balance between being “present” and being “absent” is facile, when generalized as an attitude – which is now in our culture. But I’m not against simplicity, as such. There is a dialectical exchange between simplicity and complexity, like the one between self-revelation and self-concealment…one cannot live out all of the complexities that one perceives, and to be able to act intelligently, decently, efficiently, and compassionately demands a great deal of simplification.”[i]

From an exhibition in Paris at the Centre National de la Photographie from 1998, Sans titre No. 6, Sans titre No. 7, and Sans titre No. 23, show people in the midst of contemporary, everyday life, which is unusual. Most photographs capture aspects of the contemporary by chance, if at all; for example, if the photographer happens to be in a particular contemporary environment such as a gas station or a fast food restaurant, there starts to be a relationship of sorts between the subject and the place, but in many cases photographers are not consciously doing anything with this relationship and so it remains purely passive. Jouve is not passive. Her training in sociology no doubt helps, because in sociological work you must actively engage and question things, no matter how routine they may appear. In fact it is precisely these details of everyday life – the ordinary - that are often the subject of sociological inquiry. Our attention therefore shifts from the subject/object to the environment, to the social, to the process of becoming as subjects navigate their immediate space. In these portraits the details of this complex transaction being worked out by the photographer and subject remain undecided, in the middle of an action.

With regard to method, these are portraits of people whom she has found and asked to pose. Jouve makes a notation of them, they exchange numbers, and then she waits to find an appropriate place that they can inhabit together. She then calls the subject, suggests the location and if the subject agrees a day is set aside for shooting the image. She uses a large format camera and color film but her framing is reminiscent of 35mm snapshots and often consciously mimics the laconic, offhand framing sometimes associated with ethnographic photography, which, as she herself explained, is used as a form of notation, or journal keeping. But as we have seen Jouve chooses the wrong instant – the “in-decisive moment”– this causes a displacement that is sometimes referred to by formalist criticism as the “foregrounding of the device.”

Jouve is not adverse to using digital manipulation to eliminate unwanted areas within the urban landscape that envelops the subject, or even to changing that landscape altogether, as in Untitled, n. 20, 1994/1996. Here the young, laughing, French/African woman dressed in a bright dress covered in flowers was first in a busy Parisian street but Jouve was not happy with the result. Two years later she found a better background for her subject - a car dealership reflecting the street opposite that is housing a new, white BMW automobile. Using Photoshop she combined the new background to the original portrait. The result is one of her best, and most charged works. 

The Instant

The “instant” that photography presumably captures without effort is usually ascribed to a mechanism: the shutter. Jacques Derrida identifies the “instant” as a time/space coordinate with varying degrees of duration that the word “instant” seems unable to describe. There is a gap – small in terms of time but large in terms of philosophy. Where most people see only an obvious connection Derrida sees the opposite, a subtle disconnection. In effect the word “instant” describes a generality, or a concept, but not the thing itself. This now problematic "instant" (that must from now on be in quotes) is identified by Jouve as something that is no longer a given, no longer a transparent technical byproduct, but is rather something now visible, obvious, and highly problematic. Derrida: “Reference is complex; it is no longer simple, and in that time sub-events can occur, differentiations, micrological (sic) modifications giving rise to possible compositions, dissociations, and re-compositions, to “effects,” if you like, to artifices that definitively break with the presumed phenomenological naturalism that would see in photographic technology the miracle of technology that effaces itself in order to give us a natural purity, time itself, the unalterable and un-literable (sic) experience of a pre-technical perception (as if there were any such thing).”[ii]

For Derrida, the word “instant” has a specific dictionary meaning that the mechanics of photography cannot be said to actually capture in reality because the fluctuations in time within that “instant” are not exactly the same from picture to picture. In short not all “instants” are the same. He frames this as a question: “At what moment does a photograph come to be taken?”[iii] Paul Virilio put it much more simply and poetically: “Immediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity, and ubiquity are all so many attributes of divinity that each allows us to escape the historic conditions of humanity.”[iv] The reality of the instant is the “historic condition of humanity,” while the commonplace notion of a photographic “instant” is an attribute of “divinity” – in short it is an illusion. Jouve has no desire to escape the historic conditions of humanity – on the contrary she is using the camera as an investigative tool to understand those conditions and that humanity.

What Derrida and Virilio are saying here might at first hand sound like sophistry or nitpicking but what they are suggesting is not only radical, it is quite scary. They are saying that the vast majority of portraits throughout the history of photography are, in effect, not portraits at all but people subsumed, via the photographer and the equipment at hand, to a complex series of conventions that were in place when the picture was taken. And just as importantly these conventions are in place to “escape history.” In effect we have rarely, if ever, actually seen a portrait of a person as they were inside their historical reality, but how they were when being subjected to the codes of photography.

Could this be right? Have we never actually seen a real picture of our parents? Have we never seen a real picture of a baby? If someone were to take a photograph of us free of photographic conventions would we recognize it? What would such a picture look like? Have we in some sense filtered out "real" portraits of actual human beings because they were horrifying, or boring, or incomprehensible in favor of an "idea of portraiture?" If this is so, then photographic portraits adhere to a myth of the image rather than to reality – to the thing itself. They represent the world as we would like it to be because we have been trained to see it that way.

There is a simple thought experiment that confirms Derrida’s idea: A portrait from 1900 taken in London is bound to tell us much more about the conventions of portraiture in London in 1900 than anything about the sitter - conventions that are now plainly visible from across a room but that in 1900 were invisible. At what moment does a photograph come to be taken? Jouve’s work does not answer that question but asks it in a different way, using photography itself. When conventions wither and die their artificiality becomes readily visible and we can see, not the subject of a portrait, but the conventions of photography that have become obvious. These conventions are so clear, once they are dead, that they seem to obscure the real person more than to reveal them, which, according to Derrida, is in fact the case.

Interestingly Henri Cartier-Bresson, the man who coined the term "the decisive moment" turned against this idea towards the end of his life.[v] Whether this was due to a re-consideration or to simply being fed up with people taking his famous term as a religious credo that they repeated back to him like trained acolytes, is not clear. Cartier-Bresson was well aware that his proof-sheets - full of non-decisive moments - were in some ways as interesting as the "decisive moments" that made it to the exhibits and into the books. He knew that if one took fifty photographs of a person, in some images they are likely to appear quite thoughtful, or stupid, or angry, or asleep, or - worst of all - to have some expression that is not even identifiable as an expression; but one image usually got the person as they present themselves to the public. As the Americans like to say it’s the image where all of the ducks line up, the “decisive moment.” But is it possible that another image in the same roll of film that is not decisive is in fact truer to reality? Towards the end of his life I think Cartier-Bresson started to see that while this might not be true as a rule, it might be possible. Let’s compare and see how other photographers from Jouve’s own time handle the photographic portrait.

Portraits of Power

When Sam Jones photographed Barack Obama for the cover of Rolling Stone (October 16, 2008), published one month before the US presidential election that year, he used the traditional conventions of the portrait and the most technically sophisticated apparatus then available, an 8X10 camera with a strobe. The effect was to produce a portrait that in no way questions the conventions of portraiture, and for that reason we can learn much from it. Jones’ image takes a particular approach popular in the early 21st century for celebrity portraiture - he uses a very short lens with a shallow depth of field. This means that only a very small area will be in focus and everything else will be, to various degrees, out of focus. Crisp details, that are in pinpoint focus, get accentuated - usually the eyes and the mouth. There is then a subtle gradation in focus to the nose, and then a sharp, decisive gradation to out of focus areas over the rest of the face, with the ears, neck and suit out of focus.

The lighting, which is crucial in this portrait, comes from a key light placed above and to the right of the subject, with a frontal strobe light with a diffuser to create minimal shadows. In reality this kind of lighting is never seen except in unusual circumstances, such as a hospital operating table, or an interrogation room. Its use here is meant to convey the idea that there is nothing hidden in this person – no dark corners or scary closets. This portrait by Jones is meant to convey psychological and physical health, confidence, intelligence, sobriety, and sexiness. The photographic conventions in place are presumably transparent.

Of course in a few decades, or perhaps only in a few years, it will cease to be transparent. These conventions will come to the foreground as the individual recedes into – what? Where does the person go? Jone's portrait is hip, cool and up to the minute, just like Mr. Obama wanted to present himself to the public. Whatever we may think of Obama as a person, or as a president, his portrait for Rolling Stone by Jones proclaims a new rock star is now on the horizon - one that is not at all like his predecessors, at least in a photographic sense. The portrait by Jones will inevitably recede into its early 21st century conventions. All of the positive affirmations associated with it will vanish as the portrait begins to take on the patina of a relic, an historical artifact from the early 21st century. Once this happens Mr. Obama will be difficult to read, opaque, concealed under conventions that are easily recognizable.

Power of Portraits

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Jone’s non-reflexive image is Yasumasa Morimura’s work in which he photographs himself playing out various tableaus from well-known historical paintings, photographs, and films. This work is pathologically self-reflexive. In A Requiem: Where is the Dictator? (2007) Morimura dresses up like Hitler and/or Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940)- or both at the same time - giving the Nazi salute behind a lectern. Morimura has a microphone prop made from a dildo and the figures in the background are dressed up in suits and animal masks – most conspicuously a pig. The photograph is an attempt to approach the political clichés and propaganda images from a tragic past and reconfigure them as a critique of photographic conventions that are meant to be funny.

Chaplin saw the contemporary News on the March serials in 1936, and from Hitler’s body language created The Great Dictator. The newsreels in the 1930’s were not subtitled and Chaplin did not understand one word of what Hitler was saying, but he understood the body language. He could see the pathological thug in Hitler’s facial expressions and his hand and shoulder movements, and in how he regarded a crowd when he spoke. He could see the populist power that Hitler wielded and how he used it, and how he responded to the crowd as it flowed with him, as the interaction between him and his audience was powerful and electric. It was a brilliant analysis that put the subsequent facile criticisms of Chaplin’s work as sentimental to shame. Chaplin, without understanding one word saw that Hitler’s image was disturbing, powerful, enigmatic, seductive, and terrifying, because he was there and absorbed it in real time. The dialectic at work in The Great Dictator is highly complex because of it juxtaposes a contemporary, tragic, Historical reality to slapstick, absurdist comedy - the tragic and the comic share the stage, as in Shakespeare.

For Morimura history is conflated and reduced into a simplistic neoclassical cartoonish portrait that says more about Morimura’s calculated narcissism than it does about Chaplin, Hitler, or the work that they created or sponsored. That is because Morimura is dealing with history as stock photography - in his work every historical image (fact or fiction) is part of a menu from which to concoct a meal (ironic of course) – a discursive, didactic system that does not discover meaning but animates it, or more to the point, illustrates it. The glib treatment of fascist images from the past – treated as props in a fashion shoot – are there to amuse, titillate, or shock, depending on the tenderness of one’s sensibilities. Unfortunately for Morimura the ironic tropes at his disposal have already calcified into an orthodoxy that is out of touch with everyday life – as moribund and institutionally entrenched as the 19th century European paintings of naked beauties acting out mythological scenes that bemused the wealthy patrons in the Salons of another age.

Portraits Made to Order for Those In Power

In Catherine Opie’s photographs of young athletes in front of their respective field, or training ground, we have a third possibility for the photographic portrait. In a body of work from 2010, Opie uses a large format camera to photograph high school football players in seven states across the USA. The finished color prints have no grain from the film stock - the large photographs are then framed and displayed on a wall, referencing history painting and traditional portrait art. As the text for the promotional material at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art explains the work, “...explore issues of masculinity, community and national identity.”[i]

In fact Opie’s work illustrates Walter Benjamin’s primary gripe with the medium and with photographers. Benjamin: “As Brecht says: ‘The situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reproduction of reality say anything about reality’... Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations – the factory, say – means that they are no longer explicit. So in fact something must be built up, something artificial, posed.”[ii] (emphasis Benjamin) What Benjamin is saying is that reality is missing and we are left with the pose and the concept. This is exactly what Derrida said about portraiture. We have in Opie’s work a theater of young football players in uniform dutifully arranged in a conventional, formal, manner with a conservative use of focus and frontal framing that we may read ironically or not, depending on our aesthetic tastes. The problem, as Benjamin puts it, lies elsewhere.

The complex situation – cultural, economic, racial, sexual – of teenage boys who play football in various places across America at the beginning of the 21st century is not explored at all. For that we would no doubt have to turn to the photographs that high school football players, and their family, friends and lovers, have taken of each other and themselves and posted on Instagram - or better yet those that were too strange, or intimate, or ridiculous to be posted on any social media site. These would probably provide very interesting, perhaps even fascinating and revealing explorations of “masculinity, community and national identity,” and for that very reason prove unacceptable within any institutional framework, including the one that exhibits Opie’s work. In fact such photography can probably not be shown anywhere at all. Whoever exhibits such work might very well be vilified, perhaps even sued or imprisoned. If this is true then it means that possibly there has never been, and there is currently, no outlet available for the photography of reality under any umbrella. That’s quite remarkable for a society that repeatedly refers to itself as “transparent” or “overloaded” with images and information, because of the ubiquity of pictures available 24 hours a day. That is why again, with Benjamin’s essay in mind, we can say that not only in Opie’s work, but with photographic portraiture per se, “less than ever does the mere reproduction of reality say anything about reality.” 

The idea that young men in the Midwest would need someone from Los Angeles or New York to come to their hometown and explore issues of any kind is already to some extent so removed from reality as to be unintentionally funny. One can already see the outlines of a skit that could be made from it - something like Charles Ludlam's wonderful, and very funny, play from the New York downtown art scene of the 1980's, Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde. But the moral issue becomes serious when we consider that Opie’s work has a functional reason that the institutional apparatus is interested in promoting – and that is the idea that “issues” can be photographed and inserted into artworks, that are then extrapolated by academics and museum administrators who explain what those “issues” might be to the hoi polloi – the museum goer. This helpless and uninformed public presumably needs explanations since, with regard to Opie’s work, they only see large scale photographs, with pinpoint focus, of football players wearing their gear on a field posing for a picture. The reason they see this of course is that this is what is in front of them. It is the job of the academic or museum curator to explain the meaning that lies under the surface, hidden in some invisible place that they see because they are trained professionals. Therefore it is in the descriptive text where the central nervous system of the work is to be found, not in the images, which in this case are merely the "delivery systems" for concepts.

Opie’s work serves only to stage the already prescribed notions of “masculinity, community, and national identity” that the institution would like to promote because they already have a very clear idea about football players and the correct way to understand their condition. Instead of living human beings they are “codes of masculinity,” “codes of behavior,” “codes of social conditioning,” etc. We have here a sleight of hand - a presumed attempt to extrapolate ideas from an image premade to illustrate concepts already accepted as fact.

There is certainly something that we can learn from Opie's photographs, but it is not about football players in the Midwest, but rather about the rules of reading photographic codes and discourse within institutions in Los Angeles. In a strange sense, Opie’s work is so conservative, orthodox and pedagogic that it ceases to be about those young men – just as the photograph of factories taken by photojournalists that Benjamin was describing, regardless of their well intentioned premise, were not really about factories or the people who spent their lives there, but only served the interests of pre-established narratives that used the pictures as a means to an end - the photograph is merely supporting evidence, an exhibit, a proof for discourse. The photograph trades on its exchange value in the market but it does so at the expense of its power as an expression of a consciousness, that is, it is no longer an image that thinks. The master does the thinking, the image obeys - or as Jean Baudrillard put it, the image is “made to work.”

Jouve’s Cinema

That Jouve makes films seems natural, as in her framing, she is not only cinematic, but consciously stretching the possibilities of duration in photography. Interestingly, in her films she does the opposite – slowing down the flow of images so we consider shots as still images - something that Chantal Akerman was also working with, during a similar time period, but in a different manner. Akerman plunged, with bravado, into narrative and genre, which she explored in depth in a variety of works, such as her adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly (2012). In this film she turned the conventions of the adventure film inside out to great effect, making us reconsider the very idea of what an adventure film is. When we look at the work of these two artists we are reminded that the French word for looking is “regard.”

Jouve consciously suggests duration in her framing and in the body language of the subjects at the moment that she chooses to capture them. While at first glance this might link Jouve's work with Gilles Deleuze's "any-instant-whatever" (immobile sections + abstract time) the portraits resist this classification. Jouve's images have a beautifully thought out tension between the subject and the urban landscape that is as measured and intentional as any classical portrait. This urban poetics holds our attention in a way that is outside the domain of Deleuze's concept, or any theory, regardless of how appropriate it may be to certain aspects of her work. 

The process of photography in this case is a messy, improvisational endeavor, and as in any such search the detours and the mistakes are endless, and these eventually become a part of the finished photograph. Her work signals the beginning for a concern with duration in photography as an idea, as a way of looking and understanding particular places (as opposed to the more general “space”). In a sense she achieves what Richard Avedon sought to accomplish. Avedon: “Lately I’ve become interested in the passage of time within a photograph. I’d like to be able to do one long, long photograph that begins in one place and moves logically to another, in time.”[i] Clearly Avedon wanted to fuse photography to cinema and that is something that Jouve accomplishes conceptually with her photo work by putting an emphasis on duration, and by concentrating on moments of physical and psychological transition normally outside the domain or portraiture. As she herself put it “there can be a montage within the image.”[ii]

The World at Large

In Jouve’s work, this awkwardness, this fragility of humans in motion, this uncertain nature inherent in the portrait, is where we may find the heart of her work. Her photography might be described as a ‘manifesto of awkwardness.’ The philosopher Adam Kotsko describes awkwardness as “... the best angle on our relationship to other people, or the intrinsically social nature of humanity.”[iii] Where have we seen this awkwardness before? It is in the cinema of Jean Eustache, Eric Rohmer, Agnes Varda and Jean Rouch where we see a similar polysemic aesthetic to Jouve’s. Despite many obvious differences in their work, these filmmakers sought to understand how morals and adaptation to civilization work within the everyday world as a social experience. They were fascinated by how human beings are caught in a particular time/place and how they deal with it over a stretch of time, or how they fail to do so. They do sociological research with images. They do not express ideas, but rather, they discover or find them on the street and improvise with them.

As in the work of these filmmakers, the creation of images for Jouve is something like the “close observation” as practiced by anthropologists, that is the backbone of the ethnographic cinema practiced by Rouch. This is analogous to writing history about the present moment in the first person. Is this a roundabout way of saying photojournalism? Perhaps, but photojournalism has its own demons that Jouve chooses to ignore, the most obvious being that she has the great luxury of time. She often spends months finding the right location and preparing the shoot. If that historian of the contemporary Jean Rouch could ask, with a certain bluster in 1962, “are you happy today?” Valerie Jouve asks question now with a greater sense of precariousness and skepticism, using photography as a research tool, but on her own clock. She is an artist fascinated by the complex, organic minutiae of the quotidian at the expense of any sociological theory that might explain reality by fitting it into a concept. Jouve is thinking with the photographic portrait – the subjects are on a journey with her and the images are what is left over from that journey. They are open cases in an ongoing ethnographic examination of our time, and the subject under study is, of course, ourselves.

She accomplishes the difficult task of improvisation by allowing the non sequitur and the exception space to breathe. Jouve understands how the present tense of photography also contains traces of the past and the future, of interior and exterior, mask and reality. But this cannot be interpolated, rather, it must be discovered and experienced, not just once, like a flash of inspiration, but day to day - a routine of experience and discovery. We might call this her photographic fieldwork. Instead of running away from history Jouve, like any good sociologist, practices a strategy of “close observation.”

[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Hill and Wang, 1981

[1] Valerie Jouve, Valerie Jouve, Centre National de la Photographie, 1998

[1] Valerie Jouve, Valerie Jouve

[1] Richard Kendall, Degas by Himself: Drawings, Prints, Paintings, Writings, Time Warner Books, 2004

[1] Valerie Jouve, Valerie Jouve

[1] Leland Poague, Conversations With Susan Sontag, University of Mississippi, 1995

[1] Gerhard Richter, Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, Stanford, 2010

[1] Gerhard Richter, Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature

[1] Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant, Polity Press, 2011

[1] Wang Muyan, Interview With Agnes Varda, Film Comment, September/October, 2017

[1] Los Angeles County Museum of Art Website, 2011

[1] Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography, Harvard, 2008

[1] Jane Livingston, The Art of Richard Avedon, Random House, 1994

[1] Valerie Jouve, Valerie Jouve

[1] Adam Kostko, Awkwardness, Zero Books, 2010