Titel: De-Reed

In their correspondence in the summer of 1839, John Herschel and Henry Talbot, the forerunners of the photographic technique, explain their findings for fixing pictures. While Herschel kept his secret recipe - cooking salt in water - Talbot explained that he had succeeded in fixing images with 'pure water (snow water at least, having no means of distilling)'.

It was from this that I began a series of experiments to fix photographs without chemicals. It turns out that sustainable fixation is quite slow and difficult to achieve at the moment. On the other hand, this technical deficiency prompts us to question the very enterprise of photography: fixing a specific moment on a visual plane of eternity.

We experience the disappearance of visual objects everyday - forgetting is the very basis of the functioning of our perception & memory. This is the principle that I wanted to apply in this series: to reverse the photographic function to put it at the service of the disappearance of visual elements.
Following Herschel's water line, I did not want to work with the "pure water" of a river - a symbol of renewing oblivion - but rather with the stagnant water of an industrial harbour, a water that makes a stain, a water that we do not consider from our urban environment.

These peripheral pseudo-postcards - of a forgotten place - are destined to disappear. Processed with reed harvested on the spot - an aquatic plant that filters the soil and water, and was used as a pen in the correspondence of the old days - these photos have been fixed with the stagnant water of the port and table salt.
They will slowly disappear during the exhibition to look like Roscharch tests. Here, it is not a question of interpreting what is the image-becoming of this stain, but the opposite: what is the stain-becoming of this image.
The pictorial interpretation thus refers us to our faculty of forgetting and opens up new perspectives for the photographic technique: a dynamic and drifting medium, at the service of the disappearance of reality.

_Pierre Eric_________________ ___________Baumann