Henorama

 11.08.07 – 09.11.07

The essence of photographing is not so much to illustrate an object or an event.
 It is about creating an event within it. (J. Baudrillard)

David Boulogne’s photographs are taken on walks to certain transitional and overlooked places on the periphery of the city. On this occasion London’s arterial canals and motorways have provided the artist with the subject for a new work entitled Henorama. In the spirit of their particular non-descript character, corresponding to the ‘almost-nothingness’ of a non-place, Boulogne has traced in what at first glance appeared uneventful the pre-eminent event of the photograph itself. The wide-eyed re-presentation of these uninteresting actualities is captured as the portrait of a history in the most insignificant representation of architectures of present-day urban reality. They become an index of our common and familiar condition shot with flash onto fast-film. These images, which may deny urgency, are never the less witness to the undramatic time-lines of the day-to-day city life. They symbolise collective hope and longing delimited by the loss of any sense of the drama of the real.

Henorama is the title of a new series, presented at T1+2 Gallery, in which Boulogne continues to explore certain abysmal urban topographies specifically in Tottenham along the A406 North Circular road. The name suggests in a shrug of the shoulders, ‘hen?’ ‘So what?’ to the blind spots just beyond normative limits of vision. His art attests to a troubled notion of the panoramic as a representation - its stylistic, thematic, and ideological liberation, from the constructions of 19th Century Romanticism to the progressive 20th Century project of Realism – is collapsed to a more poetic, singular, and discontent sensibility.

Boulogne’s Minox camera does not aim to capture the ‘right moment’ [of Cartier-Bresson], nor any utopian or dystopian ideal of the City, but is focussed on what is unrepresentable: the eclipse of landscape as photographed in its suspended, uncertain, and disconnected conditions.

Water Colours is a series in parallel to be shown with Henorama shot at various locations along the north canal in Hackney. Again the small and overlooked take precedence and Boulogne privileges the stranger in a strange land, as if their witness. The fiction the stranger inscribes into the event is read in her familiarity with a sense of detachment from the event. Boulogne’s photographs unfound the evidence of the eye in order to stimulate the event of detachment itself.

Water Colours, in referring to Monet’s Nympheas, complements Henorama by enhancing the bipolarity of the aesthetical codes expressed at the two extremes of the representation of the landscape, in a sublime moment of contradiction held and maintained in its beauty: of its inheritance or testimony and of the power of forgetting it. This is the challenge to photography that David Boulogne rises to, and which Jean Baudrillard affirms when he writes:

A photograph must somehow stay stranger to itself. That is its only way to become a fiction. Not a testimony.