Jean-Francois Spricigo
I make photographs for the same reason a bird beats its wings: to keep from falling. Taking flight is part of letting go.
I have kept this improbable journal by day and by night, unreasonable and yet not without reason. Not to capture anything or pin anything down—on the contrary, I’m interested in how the world trembles, the palpitating instant. Blurred or not, an image’s ‘sharpness’ consists primarily in the integrity of the process which composed it.
Reality looms up when I stop trying to objectify things by exerting my will or conditioning my thought. From that moment, my photographs acquire the honesty of emotions; they are subjective, in order to be true. This is the most sincere testimony I can give: faithfulness to the fiction of my life at the heart of Life itself. What matters to me today, at heart, is not so much my own existence as my receptiveness to the Life which runs through it. I want to close the book on the ‘beautiful’ story sold by dream-mongers and open myself instead to the vertigo of a full life, down to its very paradoxes.
Nature has reconciled me with myself and with others. Animals in particular have taught me how to find calm in the face of perceived injustices. The clearness of animals’ presence, their spontaneous steadfastness, showed me a more serene way of breathing. At their side, I became aware of the difference between the ostentatious perfection that we too often seek, and the rightness that makes no claims but simply is there. Humbly, I have looked at nature and found in it a tangible rule amidst the transformations of our societies. This is not a question of looking for oppositions or establishing a hierarchy between humans and nature, but rather of making the former understand that they are a part of the latter, and that we have never achieved any lasting thing at all by desecrating nature. I experience this in the same way as I breathe: gradually, I am learning to transcend turmoil through contemplation.
For more than twenty years now this vision has expressed itself in black and white. In 2012, I began to delve into colour on the occasion of an artist’s residency in Spain. The land and the light gave rise to this aesthetic opening. Black and white was never a constraint but rather the most appropriate brush or pen with which to depict the northern landscapes of my birthplace, pale and generous.
To live, to ‘create’—no matter what form it takes—is above all to engage one’s entire being in an event; it is a question of distance, of discernment, by which one slips into the flow of the world by the pathways of serenity. You have to trust your senses just as much as your thoughts, reconnect with canny instinct, accept paradox, in order to stop believing in contradiction and finally come to terms with your darkness as a promise of light.
Photography consists in a fragile acuity of vision, at once immediate and distant—the unknown, waiting to be explored, forges this intensity. It is a vertical climb that ends in a fall. But I am not falling; this dizziness of revelation comes from the abyss.
