JPP-MA.Mercredi.txt
Boys and girls,
Here are scans from the second book with photographs by the French artist Negrepont. I cannot add much to what I wrote about Negreponts first book, you can find this readme on my home page. I like to express my gratitude to the person who was so kind and very generous to give these books to me when I visited him last summer. He told me he hadn't seen them for a long time and that they were only collecting dust. He also told me he would like it very much when I would help him share these beautiful images with all of you. Thanks M.! I include the preface as written by Negrepont.
These photographs are grouped under the following captions:
#13-21 Tourbillons immobiles
#22-32 Chateau de papier
Enjoy,
Johnie
Wednesday afternoon
Wednesday is magic in France.
Because only the children are free: schools are closed. They can play being themselves and return to savagery.
The choice of the title of this book is simple: I can only work on Wednesday afternoons. Professional since nearly 10 years, my work is mostly devoted to childhood. Because childhood doesn't wait and that its VIRULENCE forces me to witness of my discoveries and my encounters. Children oblige to live in the instant TO LIVE THE INSTANT. Nothing is more suited to show them than photography that catches and fixes. Alchemy which transmutes flight in eternity. But also a tool faster than drawing, more honest than painting, more concrete than music.
Three years ago my first book << Paper Kids >> was published. It meant to be a sketchpad of these encounters, a simple picture book where the passed faces were carefully stuck side by side. Changing faces, I could have tirelessly made the same book over again and again. Dizzy prospects.
So I today wanted to rearrange this new book to talk about portrait, game and its setting, tell the nude body's story. Tell without words. There are in France too many theorisers and my only aim is to be a picture-maker. The particular nature of these pictures and probably my only originality is that they all have been made with the children's complicity and even with their active contributing.
It is incredible to commonly read that the only way to picture a child is to make it without his knowledge. Jesus! The photographer already easy eyer should track a so-called natural, hiding like a spy. It's a challenge to DECIDE to make pictures of children: it is them and them only who provoke the game and make possible and urgent the picture's process. Isn't it simpler and more COMFORTABLE to ask his model: who are you? But I have had to face surprising answers.
This way, I have learnt the fascination of forgotten places. So much that I have dedicated a chapter to them. Incontestably many of my 200 000 archives shots have sad surroundings. Nevertheless an old house still soaked with vital forces never is gloomy. Is it a quest of the fairy tale castle or simply the-end-of-the-garden's-shed? I'd rather see the reflection of this every instant sensuality in which the children naturally steep in, and their obstinate will to erotise their own image. Indeed a nude shoulder in a bathroom or worse on a nudist beach still remains a nude shoulder. On the other hand, where it has no reason to be (a rickety staircase, a decayed corridor) then comes surprise then comes desire.
This claimed nudity never is so disturbing as in portraits. So I equally learned the Nude-Portrait and its strange look: as if the body freed from its shackles raised towards the face, waves of gravity (and not from sadness) which seems to seal an alliance and make the picture definitive. One too often confuses sadness, loss of joy, and gravity, conscious way down in the depths of the Ego.
The main ambition of this book is to offer a tribune contributing to give back to these children some of the leading place that they should never have lost in our world, so far away from the nature of the body and the nature of life.
A child who suddenly ceases to play the child puts out: he interferes our power and our adult's certainty. Who endures a kid to forsake his child's status and to recapture his rights. That is to say he has access on an equal footing, without hierarchy and above all without any difficulties to obtain a Human Being destiny.
Well, these children have tried to translate the whole with my careful and respectful collaboration
NEGREPONT
1983
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