S'attarder et regarder, ensemble et séparément - la photographie de Gavin Parry (Lingering and looking, together and apart – the photography of Gavin Parry)

Warstat, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7408-0897 and Mock, Juliette (2022) S'attarder et regarder, ensemble et séparément - la photographie de Gavin Parry (Lingering and looking, together and apart – the photography of Gavin Parry). Maison Louis-Jardin du Mesnil-sur-Oger, Médiathèques Simone-Veil et Daniel-Rondeau d'Epernay, 17 September 2022 - 02 October 2022.

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Abstract

Photography requires time: from you, right now, when you look at these pictures, but also from the photographer, from the machines and technologies that manifest the pictures. Photography also acquires time: from the places, people and things that appear in the images, and at its best, or most crucial, photography can protect time and offset and delay decay. This is what Gavin Parry’s pictures do. Parry’s photographs – selected from various stages of his practice – show us different times, true to moments and places, people, and things, that would have disappeared or not have been noticed or ever remembered. This transformational, redemptive aspect of the photograph is something many writers and thinkers have commented on (from Benjamin and Proust to Barthes and Deleuze), but what is important is the particular way a particular photograph does this act of magical preservation. What matters is that it’s a photograph, one image, one picture – not an essay or philosophical treatise – that recovers the disappeared and lost, and it’s this power that stops an image being subservient or secondary to the written word.