According to Susan Sontag, a photograph can never reflect reality:
“It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.”
So why not record everything? Not just one image, but infinitely many?
In 1912, the French banker Albert Kahn conceived what was then an almost unthinkable plan. He wanted to map all traces of human life across the world, for eternity. Les Archives de la Planète was the name of his ambition. He employed a large group of photographers and cinematographers who dispersed across the globe. They returned with 72,000 autochromes, 4,000 stereoscopic views, and 180,000 meters of film. Yet the archive would never be completed. In 1931, the project came to an abrupt end when Kahn went bankrupt.
Christian Boltanski also devoted his work to the idea of archiving life. In his artist’s book Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944-1950 (1969), he states his ambition to record his entire existence for eternity. Everything he said, everything said to him, every trace of every moment, all the objects that surrounded him. Everything. But, he concludes, he started too late. The material from his childhood had already disappeared: discarded, forgotten, or never recorded. The book becomes an attempt to reconstruct the beginning of a life using only what remains.
The result is a cheaply produced artist’s book: nine black-and-white photocopies, held together with a plastic clamp. The pages show, among other things, a class photograph in which Boltanski appears as a child, fragments of clothing – a piece of sweater, a shirt- a bed, a reading book, everyday documents. Parts of the content are invented. They are shared, almost cliché-like memories. What Boltanski ultimately reveals is the impossibility of a complete archive. It always contains gaps. It is, by nature, unreliable.
I make one book every year. My work revolves around the fleeting details of daily life. Through these books, I am building an archive of the everyday. I published my first book in 2012. At the time, I was working full-time in the corporate world while studying photography. Through my job I encountered many CEOs and companies, and gradually became disillusioned with the business climate of that period. I withdrew into my artistic practice, away from opportunism and grand ambitions. I chose something smaller: the fleeting details of daily life. My work became a form of quiet resistance.
Alber Kahn: https://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr/en/
Christian Boltanski: https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Recherche-et-presentation-de-tout-ce-qui/92BABEAF2D6B9B3B29247F227F7E0B3