François-Marie Banier and Photographic Creativity by Michel Tournier
No art reveals tts meaning as immediately as photography. Literary words need hours of reading-time, musical works have to be executed and listened to, even painting calls for contemplation and meditation. However, a photographer’s work unveils itself straight away with extraordinary and sometimes fearsome brutality. It says everything to us all at once. It shows us men, women and children whom we recognise as belonging to our familiar universe, but strangely, paradoxically we have the impression at the same time that we are seeing them for the first time. This is true also of landscapes which are obviously our own, but where we feel ourselves terribly disorientated.
What does François-Marie Banier’s work say to us ? The first thing to strike us is Banier’s force. He shows us poor people, old people, sick people, eccentric people, even mad people. These figures, however are never pitiable. They do not seek to hit us below the belt. They are full of intense vitality, self-assurance and a zest for life which warms the heart. François-Marie Banier likes to photograph twins, and the reason is clear: the doubling of a single being gives greater force to the image – one might say that the image itself is “squared”. The twin is an ordinary person inhabited by the monstrosity of being two people. Approaching like all professional photographers “the rich and famous”, Banier repeatedly faces us with a key question: what difference is there between the face of a “famous” man or woman and that of an unknown? His response is clear: there is no difference. Thanks to him, we pass by in the street Rostropovich, Horowitz, Marie Laure de Noailles, Ray Charles, Mick Jagger, Joselito, Silvana Mangano, etc. One of his secrets is undoubtedly that his characters are never isolated from their surrounding, as is usually the case in ordinary portraits and especially in official portraits. The Armenian photographer Youssuf Karsh made a speciality of photographing the great men of his time (Popes, Heads of State, Nobel Prize winners), whom he surrounded with a sense of tragic isolation and whom he entombed in a museum_like eternity. François-Marie Banier, however, creates a sense of intimate solidarity between his subjects and their surroundings. One of the highpoints of his work is his photograph of Samuel Beckett walking on a beach, where in the distance and just above his head there is a child kicking a football who seems to be exactly replicating Beckett’s way of walking.
And then there is Brazil, to which François-Marie Banier has devoted an impressive book. This Brazil is a country of flesh and of sunlight, of luminous faces lit by joie de vivre, and of supple, sensual bodies which invite us to physical contact. The different races which make up its population – and which in the United States are in conflict – fuse in Brazil into one single type whose main characteristic is a love of life in common. “Blacks, whites, masks: who or what is shadow, who or what is light?” asks Banier. “In this kingdom of music and dance that is Brazil, even shapes have the ability to love and to be loved.” Poverty is greater here than in India, for example, but it is experienced differently. Indians may have wonderful faces, but there no bodies beneath their tunics. Their spirituality shines out, but in a strangely bloodless way. In Calcutta, poverty assails and traumatises the visitor, who can never manage to shake off the ever-present beggars. On the other hand, the Brazilians always seem eager to give and seduce. They are beautiful, well-dressed, smiling and welcoming. And always in the background there is the carnival of Rio de Janeiro for which they save up throughout the year. It is a fact that the richer a country is, the more miserable are its pageants, while the poorer a country is, the more splendid are its festivities. Samba, carioca fever, rumba, the fantastic tumble of extravagant costumes and sumptuous naked flesh : all of this is splendidly flaunted in just one special night.
The Photographic Upheaval
For centuries, it was accepted that the ideal of the figuratives arts (drawing, painting and sculpture) was to imitate reality. Pascal was undoubtedly one of the first people to question this idea in a typically provocative assertion: “How useless is painting, which attracts admiration by the resemblance of things, the originals of which we do not admire!” He was right! If painting is nothing more than the imitation of the real, it is worth nothing. If it is really worth something – and who could possibly question that? – this is because it is not in fact the imitation of the real. This simple truth exploded like a bomb on the day when the invention of photography was revealed.
It is generally accepted that the first photograph in history was made by Nicéphore Niepce from the window of his house in Chalon-su-Saône in 1826. However, it took another 20 years for the photographic revolution to shake up all parts of the art world. The celebrated “war painter” Horace Vernet famously declared, on coming back from the Institute where the discovery of photography had been announced, that “painting is dead”. This was true, it must be said, of his own type of painting; the first photographs taken on battlefronts come from the American War of Indepence in the 1860s. The same was true also of the portrait. Félix Tournachon (1820-1910), known as Nadar, was a professional portraitist, who insisted that his clients spent many long hours posing for him. However, the advent of photography enabled him to do without these sittings: he photographed his subjects and then worked from the photographs. A little later, another idea came to him: why bother sketching these portraits when they already existed in photographic form of all the great men of his time, the most clebrated of which is his portrait of Baudelaire.
This was an astonishing victory, for this same Baudelaire wrote about the creation of photography: “In matters of painting and sculpture, the present day Credo of the sophisticated, above all in France, is this:’I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature. I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature.” A vengeful God has given ear to the prayers of the multitude. Daguerre was is Messiah. And now the faithful says to himself: “Since Photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire, then Photography and Art are the same thing.” From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal.”
In point of fact, the marriage between painting and photography turned out to be a close and fruitful one, even although there were inevitably stormy rows and conflicts. Out of this union came a profound revolution in painting and led to Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. Indeed, it was Nadar himself who in 1874 held in his studio the first exhibition of the “outdoor painters” who were later to be given the ironic name of “Impressionists”. And what was the 1970s hyper-realism of Richard Estes, Malcom Morley, Chuck Close and Richard McLean and many others, if not an attempt by painting to defeat photography on its own territory, i.e. the meticulous reproduction of reality ?
I would add that photography revolutionised not only painting, but also the very way in which we look at things. Accustomed to looking at photographs from our earliest childhood, we no longer see things in the same way. I will give just one singular and telling example. The horse is the animal most familiar to mankind; this has been the case since ancient times. . Now, all drawn, painted or sculpted representations of a moving horse are absolutely aberrant with regard to the positioning of its legs. “No, whether it is walking, trotting or galloping, a horse never ever has its four legs in that position”, might we say to all of these artists. The case of Théodore Géricault is particularly shocking, because he painted many horses and was himself an outstanding horseman (he died in a fall from a horse). However, all of his paintings of horses are aberrant, even his famous Derby at Epsom of 1821. The year in question is interesting, because at that time photography did not yet exist. On the other hand, one can say that from 1850 onwards, sketchers and painters felt obliged to place the legs of horses in positions which respect reality. Clearly, it is photography which made them do this.
The Creative Gaze
Is photography creative or is it only the mechanical reproduction of an image. After all, everything is presented to the photographer and all he has to do is to fix it on paper with his camera…
When one spends time in the company of the “greats” of photography, one realises just how wrong this naïve position is. One comes to understand a simple, brutal fact: they see things that no one else can see. The image they create are therefore their own creation. At this point, it therefore seems appropriate for me to do a bit of philosophy…
The problem of Knowledge is the problem of the relationship between two terms, the knowing subject and the known object: on one hand, the chemist and on the other, the chemical; on one hand, the astronomer, on the other, the star, etc. When faced with this opposition, there are two possible responses: either that the subject is dominant ( which in philosophical terms is idealism), or the object is predominant (which gives us realism). The idealist considers the object as amorphous matter to which he must give structure and meaning. That is the whole point of laboratories. The realist thinks that everything is in the object and that the subject must learn everything by exploring it, recognising that he himself is nothing more than a mass of ignorance, illusions and prejudice. One can plausibly argue that all philosophy is essentially idealistic and is defined by the first sentence of Arthur Schopenhauer’s main work, Die Welt und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation): “The world is my representation.” The discovery of the Universal law of gravitation is said to have come to Newton when he saw an apple fall.
The first interpretation of this story is naively realistic: the fall of the apple contained “the universal law of gravitation”, and all Newton had to do was to see it. But it is patently obvious that this interpretation does not stand up when one thinks about it. Where was the universal law of gravitation? In the falling apple or in Newton’s mind? The falling of the apple was evidently just an event, an image that set off in Newton’s mind a thought-process that was to last some considerable time. Before him, thousands and thousands of men had seen thousands and thousands of apples fall without ever thinking about any law of physics. Everything was in Newton’s gaze and the way that he saw the apple fall- and this question of the gaze brings us very naturally back to photography.
In order to elucidate the mystery of photographic creativity, I shall resort to one final image. Let us imagine a man walking slowly across an immense desert of pebbles. As he goes forward, he is surrounded by millions an millions of pebbles. Occasionally, he bends down to pick-up pebble. He examines it and throws it down. Just occasionally, he keeps a pebble and puts it in a bag. His house is one vast museum of pebbles, all of which come from the desert. However, the visitor swiftly notices that their shapes are all unusual, strange, sometimes beautiful, more often disquieting. And what is most striking is the feeling of kinship that unites these hundreds os inanimate objects. Yes quite simply, they are marked by a certain style, the style of the pebble-picker. It is a question here of true creation. It is the gaze of the picker which endows each chosen pebble with full existence. Before being chosen, a pebble has no more than a potential existence, lost as it amidst the multitude of all the other pebbles.
This kind of creation is like that of the photographer, in that the facial expressions, the movements, the gestures and the dances of the people he meets have no more real existence than the pebbles in the desert. It is the taking of the photograph that gives them their true existence.
A Biographical Note
I was initiated to photography by my maternal grandfather. He was the village chemist of Bligny-sur-Ouche near Beaunes in Burgundi (700 inhabitants). At that time, the taking of photograph and the devoloping and the printing of it were chemical operations, and so a pharmacist seemed particularly well qualified to undertake them. With my grandfather, I photographed on glass plates christenings, marriages, young men in uniforms doing their military service. When I was still very young, I was given a Kodak camera which was my constant companion whenever I took trips or went on holyday.
Everything changed for me in 1960 with the creation of the second French television channel, for which I produced a monthly programme on photography called Chambre Noire (Dark Room). This lasted until 1965, during which time we made 50 programmes. In that period, I learned an enormous amount about photography - because I met with many of the giants of photography, who would spend days initiating me into the secrets of their art. Amongst them were Brassaï, Bill Brandt, Man Ray, Doisneau, Lartigue, etc. The first thing that they taught me was that I myself was absolutely hopeless as a photographer… Oh yes, I knew how to make pretty pictures, but there was no true creativity in these “works”, whereas the true photographer is a creator, even although this fact is not widely recognised. I shall come back to this.
I became friends with great photographers, especially the Frenchman Edouard Boubat and the American Arthur Tress. With Boubat, I travelled widely in Canada, Japan and Egypt, and with Tress in the USA. Everywhere that we went, I witnessed a fascinating phenomenon: wherever they went, I would see spectacles, scenes and characters which clearly belonged to them suddenly appear as if by magic. This was their world and all they had to do was to take a photograph of it. I too had a camera. I too could ‘take a photo’. But every time all I produced was either sub-Boubat or sub-Tress, because as far as photography is concerned, there is no such thing as a “Tournier”.
Nonetheless, I did gain a great deal from these experiences. I may not have learned to be a photographer, but I did learn to see. I became a gaze, and none of my novels, were written without me exploring the places and environments where they are situated. My mentor Zola did exactly the same thing when he went down into the coal mines in order to write Germinal.
I discover also that the more that one is seen, the less that one sees. Ideally, one should be completely invisible, like the hero of the HG Wells novel, The Invisible man. To be able to go everywhere without being noticed, to look as ordinary as possible. I recently discovered to my delight that the average French man is 1.76 m tall and that is exactly my height, it is the ordinary height par excellence. Well done, Michel!
Furthermore, it seems, to me that I am making progress as I get older. With age, I see things that seem extraordinary to me. Jean Paulhan once said; “People improve on acquaintance. Because they become more mysterious..” I am convinced that the ordinary, the dull everyday and the mediocre do not exist in any objective way. It is our gaze that allows them to exist. We see what we deserve to see. Beauty is not rare. For anyone who has the eyes to see, it is to be found at every street corner.*
I was travelling home recently in my suburban train when a musician-beggar came and stood in front of my seat to play his violin. He wore a hat and had a large beard-very much the “artist” figure. Sitting opposite me were two small African girls of six and eight years. Their mother was sitting beside me. They were captivated by the music. They hugged each other and, still seated, began to dance together on the seat, laughing joyously. Their mother tried in vain to calm them down. The old, bearded artist and the two little African girls made an absolutely enchanting picture, but I suspect that I was the only person in the jam-packed carriage who noticed it.
This proves that ageing is not totally negative. I may now walk less well, but I see much, much better…
