A MODERN CLASSIC - PATRICK ROEGIERS

" Children born at night have birthdays just like everyone else ".
Francis PICABIA

Sincerity is the base on which, for nearly thirty years now, François-Marie Banier has been building up an admirable and singular body of work, far from the established schools and movements. Like Eugène Atget, E.J. Bellocq and Jacques-Henri Lartigue, he has long worked in solitude, in the shadows, neither seeking nor caring to show his photographs, taking them for himself alone and alternating with equal felicity between a fascination with great artists and compassionate interest in ordinary people.

THE FASCINATION OF STRANGENESS

Foremost among the latter, we should note the solitary, infinitely touching figures that are these isolated passers-by in long or floral dresses, straw or fur hats, met by chance on the common ground of the street. Straight out of a Sempé drawing, capturated on Rue du Regard or Rue Monsieur; mischievious, droll or frightened , busy with their destiny, like white mice or ants. Pulling along their shopping bags or their dog, they form a cortege of persons who are similar and yet highly individual, who unwittingly trace a blueprint of society. In counterpoint to these promeneuses, or traverseuses, we have the equally lonely men in their berets or caps, following their shadows, playing the harmonica or tuba, epitomising an eternal France of the common man as Henri Cartier-Bresson might have celebrated it. François-Marie Banier takes them humorously and affectionately under his wing, according them not only his gaze, but endowing them with an identity denied by the indifferent world.
Worthy of a Monsieur Hulot, their distressed silhouettes are seen double, as if we had drunk too much, in the duos of twins, these clones with fags and spectacles crossing the Rue de Rivoli, or these twin sisters stuck together like “monkeys in white powder”,(1) walking in step and arm in arm in the Jardins du Luxembourg and portrayed by Banier’s Minox in 1979, 1980 and 1981 as he left them and returned to them and finally lost sight of them, writing this pathetic plea: “They have shaken me off. What part of town do you frequent? I beg you, get in touch.” Twins of Diane Arbus’s twin sisters, they personify a major theme of photography, that medium of inversion and duality, of mirror-like reversibility and uncertain identity.
These inseparable and colourful creatures (“one pale pink, the other almond green”) are ideal models through whom Banier, who avers that he is no physiognomist, pursues his quest for secret worlds. He gives them a name and a face that is immediately unmasked, as with Marie-Laure de Noailles, at home, caught in the triple mirror that endlessly reflects the multiple faces of the same person. And of course, like Madeleine Castaing, the Proustian coquette, supporter of Soutine and spitting image of Giulietta Massina, wig in hand (off with all masks!), showing herself without make-up in a portrait that is terrible yet droll, offering her truth to the photographer through the gift of an image not stolen but freely accorded. And DESIRED, even, by the model.
Like old age (“the summit for a portraitist”), solitude is a hell made bearable by the fidelity between partners that so moves Banier, and that he has capturated on numerous occasions, like that of the pair taking each other’s hand on the pavement in winter – Brueghel’s parable of the blind. Or that of Cioran and Simone, of Borges and Maria Kodama, of Balthus and Setsuko. Or of Madeleine Renaud, having emerged from Beckett’s hillock, hat askew, a sad smile on her little face, beside Jean-Louis Barrault, the fallen mime of Les Enfants du Paradis, perching like two sparrows on a bench, in front of their theatre in June 1987, and then five years later, outside their flat, strolling players struck off the rolls. But inseparably tied by fifty years of togertherness.
Among Banier’s most moving images are certainly those he took of Samuel Beckett, in shorts and tee shirt, upright and barefoot on the beach at Tangiers in August 1978. These distant photographs, taken by a respectful admirer who followed him and kept at a distance, restore the body of a man has too often been imprisoned in the image of Beckett the severe aesthete, the hermit draped in saintliness. It allows us to see him walking pensively along as he used to do in the Irish countryside, his craggy silhouette contrasting with the graceful, barechested boy playing with a ball in the background. Banier offers us the gift of his presence, making no distinction between the man and the writer, that famous stranger whom he said he photographed “Like Monsieur Melon!” (2) and frames like the ordinary folk he rubs shoulders with in the street. And of course that deeply poignant shot taken three days before his death in October 1989, showing the Nobel literature prizewinner sitting on a bench, like a heron, leaning on a walking stick, in a square not far from the old peolple’s home which he had escaped for a few minutes, where no one knew who he was.
Finally, there is that ultimate close-up which celebrates the beauty of the person made of flesh and blood as well as thoughts. Beckett’s face, which bespeaks the cohesion of body and mind, is worn, rough-carved, patinated and set on fire by the flame of the hair, the depth of the wrinkles, the clear blue eyes, the fiery gaze charred by the terror of silence, the attribution of language and the cry. “The Human Face [is] a Furnace seal’d”, wrote William Blake. More than a face, what Banier exalts is a head in Alberto Giacometti’s sense of the word. Usually so retiring, the writer allows himself to be caressed by our gaze – amiable, trusting, mysterious, touching and very much alive. And offers posterity his wizened face, like an image of his work. “A thousand words. Six months of crossing-out.”

FAMILY SPIRIT

As well as solitary strangers and illustrious writers, Banier photographs actors and actresses famed for their talent and beauty, like Catherine Deneuve during the filming of Le temps retrouvé, Raoul Ruiz’s Proust adaptation, or Faye Dunaway, as pensive as Lauren Bacall, in a café where Nathalie Sarraute could have written. And, of course, the gracious and luminous Isabelle Adjani, the photographer’s comradely Egeria and sublime muse, sticking out her tongue at him just like Vladimir Horowitz. Of this gallery of portraits that is quite the antithesis of a pantheon, Banier says quite openly that they are members of HIS family, the family that he is reconstituting, fitting together like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw whose unity he recreates as he goes along.
However, there is one of these actresses whose aura is greater than the others’. This is Silvana Mangano, whose portrait he has taken so many times – in a swimsuit emerging from the waves, or as a Lartigue heroine playing golf in a white dress at Santo Domingo in July 1985. Loving mother, maternal lover but also Madonna with veil in this biblical photograph from October 1984 in Paris which is at once an effigy of mourning and an allegory of grief that, in the way the subject abruptly seeks support from the empty chair, summons up the memory of Federico, the son who died ten years earlier, his place suddenly being taken by Banier himself. As the latter confesses when speaking of his subjects, “For many of them I have been the dead son.” (3) Hence the aura of the shot taken in Paris in December 1981, coming out of the Hôtel Raphaël at six in the evening, where the face of “the most beautiful woman in the world”, changelessly graceful, emerges against a haze of fur in which, shadowed, crepuscular, it is thrown back. Writing “A mio figlio” on the margin, the Viscontian actress dedicated her portrait to Banier, the cherished and renegade child who is also that “surrogate son” described in Balthazar, fils de famille, the second or third in line of three offspring who so yearns to be irreplaceable.
One of the keys to the work of François-Marie Banier, then, is to know that, for comfort, he is building himself a family on his own incommensurate scale, in his own image. A writer as well as a photographer, he composes his family romance from this starry cast of characters among which he imagines elective fathers and tells himself stories expressive of a melancholy yearning for a motherland (Hungary) that he knew only through the figure of his father; the solitude born of the mother’s absence. And his fidelity towards those who are manifestly his peers, like the actor Pascal Greggory, his “favourite”, his brother, that alter-ego and friend whom he loves, who is also his “good genie”, a double of his heavenly twin and his guardian angel, embodying eternal youth and defying the years with photography, whose function, as Banier strikingly puts it, is to “strangle passing time”.

A CHOREGRAPHER OF THE INSTANT

Life is merely suspended; it is an intermission, a between-times, an interlude. “I take them on the edge of the precipice. At that very brief moment when, by their inattention, they reveal themselves.” So says Banier, who is captivated by creators, like his friend the designer Yves Saint-Laurent, whom he catches from every angle – at work, white-coated, swaggering in the workshop, smoking, meditating, on all fours, smiling with his mother, Lucienne Saint-Laurent. But also with eyes closed, turning away and even supine like an effigy on his bed in Bénerville in May 1989. Or like Nicole Wisniac buried in the half-light. “Frivolity is a violent state,” said Marcel Proust. Banier remembers. He steals upon the extras of Le Temps retrouvé in their sleep. And, knowing that death is the mother of fashion, dreams up a funereal procession for the Figaro Madame in the summer of 1999, a splendid and Felliniesque parade of queenly vamps and faded vestals, radiant passers-by, stepping delightedly from the train of life there at the end of the line.
Loving his models less for their fame than for their qualities, Banier does not make statues of them but offers a vision that is as tender as it is unexpected by showing them as more real than our idea of them, and as real as life. For is not life a film where each person plays their own part? And are not famous people the heroes of another life, the life of representation, of role-playing, that we all fantasise about? Which is why Banier catches them off balance, plucks them leaping, dancing and skipping, like Marcello Mastroianni during the filming of Dark Eyes. That marvellous actor with his multiple selves confirms Michaux’s credo: “There is no me. There is not ten mes. There is no mine. Me is only a moment of equilibrium.”(4) The same goes for Eric Rohmer, a muscular athlete exercising with a skipping rope between takes at Granville (another shot catches him as a spindly tarantula arched over a score). Truman Capote leaving his Paris hotel (1968), mouth agape under the awning of an umbrella, his right hand joining with that of the white-gloved porter. And Vladimir Horowitz, his favourite model, whom he spent ten years escorting hither and thither, at the Steinway Hall, New York, in 1985, playing air music on an invisible piano. Or celebrated in a close-up of his hands, really playing now or joined, as superb as Piet Mondrian’s spectacles capturated by André Kertész, whom Banier certainly admires above all other photographers, and whom he stood before a picture window in Paris in December 1984; and Salvador Dali ensconced in his square throne; Tennessee Williams with his back to the wall; John Huston, a puffed-out titan in a cape, posted beside his oxygen canister; and Michelangelo Antonioni, bisected by a ray of light, radiant with the muteness in which, they say, he was immured by embolism.
These documents full of life and passion are remarkable because they render the immensely precious freshness of the first glance. They are the fruit of a vision free of calculation or affectation, purely instantaneous and precisely composed in the evanescence of the moment that never returns, that is gone the moment it is caught and canned. That is one of the crucial virtues of François-Marie Banier whose every image sparkles with youth and who is fifty-three and has been taking photographs since he was sixteen - thirty-seven years with his eye to the viewfinder, and the pleasure of seeing and pinning down life has never palled into a system. As he himself admits, “I don’t believe what I see.”
Rigour, profundity, curiosity and intuition are the primary qualities of these snapshots gathered by this reporter of intimacy, this portraitist, ethnologist of the soul and artist. Banier never gets people to pose. But he creates joy, emotion, because he operates in sympathy with his subject, counting on surprise and chance, on exchange with the model, even if he may even mistrust them, as he did with Louis Aragon, whom he described as “unphotographable” because he was incapable of forgetting the lens for even a sixtieth of a second. This is the case with the stiffer, let us say, “official” portraits of Oshima, Yamamoto, the very jocular Kenzo, the suave Gong Li and the Emperor and Empress of Japan, who are necessarily less ebullient; with Queen Elizabeth II of England drinking her tea; or François Mitterrand visiting Amman, ascending the steps as if they were plateaus of posterity, aware of his posture, amused and no doubt a tad surprised to see Banier perching on the top of the walkway like a high-flying paparazzo, clicking away at him like low-angle lightning – but also securing that most precious of things, an exchange.
Banier treads a fine line. He works with respect and cruelty, humour and gravity, admiration and rage, and showers on his models distress and grace, pain and majesty so that his portraits are never unequivocal but always contradictory and complex beneath their apparent simplicity. Their undeniable seductiveness. And their lasting impact that makes them at once terrible and familiar, improper and yet most fitting. And consequently unforgettable, like Nathalie Sarraute in Oxford in June 1991, looking elsewhere, spectacles in hand, magnified by the perspective of the foreground, a kind of domestic proscenium arch, her flowing shawl matching the tray of opaline crockery in a strict pattern of light, shapes and objects setting off the austere, strong head of this person who said she had no “appearance” and built her work on the emotions of being and consciousness and hated to be nailed down in a frame for fear of being “thingified”. As with Beckett, Banier brilliantly rises to the tough challenge that can be summed up in a single sentence: “To photograph is to write a face, a body, definitively, for eternity.”

CHANCE AND TRUTH

Fragility is the common denominator of the persons approached by Banier, along with vulnerability. As he writes: “When the click awakens them and I sense a hint of the will to appear different or, worse, to collude, I stop – or keep going until they forget the camera.” These words clearly express the integrity, honesty and radicality that underpin the courage to SEE. The photographer experiences the image as a present. He is as involved as the person photographed and returns what they give him. Surprise is a decisive component as is CHANCE in the risky act of summoning presence which is the contrary of a game of skill: a constant exposure to danger. By his own admission more intrigued by the false than the true, Banier is a choreographer of the instant who walks the high wire, and that is why so many of his images mimetically reflect the disequilibrium of his practise. A shadow show of tightrope walkers in Paris, the tramp at the fair on the Kings Road, the dancers of the Moulin-Rouge, Barbara at the Mogador like an oblong black eagle, levitating with her arms outstretched, or Pascal Greggory in the air, a weightless Icarus hanging on to a sheet in a bedroom in Geneva – these are the acrobatic pendants of the twirling and capricious ballet of life capturated in a click by photography.
If Banier excels at expressing the mystery that so fascinates him in other people, we too often overlook the neat arrangement, strict conception and perfect architecture and structure of his images. This is borne out in the portraits of empty places that he contemplates at his leisure, without the plus of human presence. Witness the view of a rainy street in Tokyo where the row of vertical posts adjusts to the flatness of the wet ground. Or, again in Tokyo, this frontal view of trees painted on a garage door, with dots of colour that he could easily have applied himself. Or, still in Tokyo, in the composition of rakes and brooms, that choreography of triangular bundles, of straight lines and curves, worthy of the purist photographers of the 1930s. Or again, in those verdant settings, garden paths and park alleys, where the unobtrusive zone of vacant places holds the inner life of space, seen not from outside but from within. None of which rules out irony in the depiction of everyday scenes caught on the hoof, like the fellow removing the hair from his legs at the bus stop (the exuberance of the composition is redolent of Garry Winogrand); the old man dipping his fingers into a glass in Buenos Aires, a purgative ritual of an impermeable banality, the photo a pendant to the beggar in Rio holding his dentures in his palm. And of course, the children of the favelas whom Banier treats without a hint of exoticism and has assigned a whole chapter of a future book. They show this ethologist and reader of codes to be as fluent in New Delhi and Kathmandu as he is in Oxford or Monte Carlo.

THE CALLIGRAPHY OF SECRETS

One of Banier’s most interesting contributions to the art of photography are the annotations, cursory observations and inscriptions of words or whole sentences with which he covers his images. Certainly, photographs had been written on before he came along, but not in the same way. In the form of commentaries, captions or subtitles written on the edge of the print, whereby someone like Duane Michals expresses a point of view that is not given by the contents of the image. Linking the gesture of the scribe, the Chinese calligrapher, to the verbomania of the writer, , the iconoclastic, respectful Banier works as a graphographer, a raving graphomaniac, who yields to the urge to write and literally but also literarily covers the print, which becomes a second original as well as fascinating palimpsest that reveals, word by word, in black and white, the hidden reason for his attachment to the subject.
For there is the content of the text written in full flow, an act of speech by the author of the image more than by the subject depicted, so significant that in the imposing monograph published by Gallimard/Denoël in 1991, the texts are reproduced on their own at the back of the book. Here we can read the narrative of the exact circumstances of the photograph and, beyond that narrative, a reminder of the life lived around it. Here come to light the ulterior motives, the background and the unconscious intentions that, strictly speaking, constitute the image’s silent speech. The text prolongs the photograph, makes the silence speak not only because photographs “sometimes have other things to say”, but also because, as Simonide puts it, “Speech is the image of actions”. Banier acts simultaneously as photographer and writer by offering up these indelible sketches without cheating – these first drafts curved out in a single stroke, without corrections or second thoughts, impulsively traced on the flesh of the sensitive paper or the grain of what is now both print and proof, an object at once literary and photographic.
Like a way of correcting time, the handwritten inscription keeps the photograph at a distance, points straight to the trap of the invisible and challenges the immortalised moment by rewriting it in the present, often years later, as if to verify the memory thereof and make sure that the past is still alive. Pregnant with meaning, words take on the power to overturn forms, acquiring new aesthetic and plastic virtues that develop autonomously, with their own aptitudes, different every time. Sometimes, as in the case of the twins (1979), the words run unstoppably in a straight line. Or gravitate in every direction, saturating space, climb over shapes, strike out floor, ceiling and walls (Roissy, October 1989). They bury Horowitz under the music of words and convert the photo into a musical score. Like the snowy forest in Saint Petersburg that Banier found “boring” (December 1988), and that becomes a stave to which notes delicately attach themselves like crows’ feet or spidery trails. These texts live their lives and deserve our attention in their own right, attesting the unique inventive freedom of this photographer emancipated from his medium who is not afraid to invent a new one when what he has seems inadequate. The origin of this can no doubt be found in the portrait of Aragon in Paris in June 1979, reading a handwritten sheet entitled “PROSE” . Banier’s photo is as much a portrait of the text, on which it focuses, as of the writer, who is hazy and in the background. If not of writing itself.

EPIPHANY OF THE INVISIBLE

“Photography gives us what we ask of literature”, writes Banier, who inclines towards clarity but whose style bespeaks his latent, ever more eloquent aspiration to invisibility. And, from there, to illegibility. Conducted by the act of writing, which at first reassured him, the writer gradually started painting on his photographs, and even covering them almost entirely with paint, as in the portrait of Claude Lévi-Strauss. And, more emblematically, of Henri Cartier-Bresson leaving his flat facing the Tuileries. Born like a kind of graffiti, a sprightly marking that takes shape and, surreptitiously, possession of the space left free in the print, the painter’s gesture gradually breaks away from the photographic figures, these being covered at first in black or white India ink, then in colour distilled by the brush, following on from the boldly drawn signs and cryptograms. Treating the print like a two-colour palette, Banier embarks daily on the adventure of creating abstract forms which deform things so that, for example, a chair becomes a figure, an armchair a baroque stage – then frees himself with agile, flowing, de-lineating touches that repaint the fixed images in the colours of life.
Like a tachiste, in exuberant and joyous tones with dominants of blazing yellow, fulsome red, apple green, light purple or cerulean blue, he spatters, smears and embellishes Warhol, Johnny Depp or Ray Charles, boldly spangling them with blots, scabrous sketches, circles, zigzags and patches of colour. Banier says he ceases to look at his photographs when painting them, yet he braces himself against them like a scaffold that ensures his equilibrium, a narrative that he can carry to its conclusion. Never mind the subject (pretext), whether Yves Saint-Laurent writing a letter, or children in the Square Lamartine with whose exuberance he associates himself by festive colouring and riotous tones that unite with the model. Every time you can feel the joy taken in this coloured covering, but also uncovering and discovering, of an unknown space that he explores, into which he ventures boldly and ingeniously, impelled by the desire to invent, to create a new landscape – and, in so doing, a world buried beneath the one described by the photograph, literally depicted by the painter, who unmakes the recorded image and, at the same time, reveals another one.
The painterly impulse and gesture taps into both the psychedelic energy of Mick Jagger and the outward irony of the Clintons at Omaha Beach, laughing at everything, themselves included. But let there be no mistake, all this brilliance and enticting ardour should not be allowed to overshadow the fundamental reason for these deceptively playful and wild works. Banier seeks another image behind what he sees. Tasking painting with the revelation of that which cannot appear, through it he seeks to have the invisible really show itself through the visible. And he goes about demonstrating the truth that he himself has durably experienced: the real is ultimately invisible, only that which is invented exists. Treating the black-and-white print like a blank canvas that he delivers from the figure in order to reveal another one, created by his own hand, he offers clear proof of this in the three versions of Matin de Paris (I, II and III: 1998, 1998, 2000), modulating and modifying its mood and climate with his tones, in accordance with the intimate sensation he is projecting.

THE CONQUEST OF GESTURE

“I paint as fast as I see”, says Banier of the paintings that are dated but without title or subject. Freely conceived, they exist under the sign of disruption, of energy and the irruption of the unexpected. For the first thing that strikes and seduces is the wildness and élan of this untrammelled act unleashed by movement, the surging that brings colour the moment it touches the canvas. Full of ellipses and leaps, of sudden starts, suspensions, the path of the brush makes it abundantly clear that this painting operates under the sign of the UNPREDICTABLE. As indeed do the photos, of which it is the precise extension, but freed of the descriptive, narrative and anecdotal function linked to the subject, becoming its very matter. Banier works without rules (there are rules, but not organised by him) and trusts in intuition when, in a state of creative drunkenness, an almost visionary trance, he produces and, yielding to the labour of his inspiration, buckles down to the avowed dream of recreating the world. Eruptive, instinctual, between Keith Haring, Sigmar Polke and Cy Twombly, this painting of splashes and drips conquers with these bright, pert colours that declare all the pleasure and freedom there is in the act of painting.
If in the overwritten photos he acts as a graphologist, and if in the painted photos he reveals the invisible realm concealed by sight, the painting is wholly the work of the hand that dances, led by the body. We must measure the effort made by this man of words and writing to substitute gesture for speech and, little by little, in all humility, doggedly, seek out the pleasure of movement, of the expressive body, guided by the hand that spurts, drips and transmits emotion and sensation rather than the expression of meaning. As he himself says, “I paint what I feel and not what I see”(5), adding, “I paint the way one cries out”(6). Banier’s painting has no centre, it rushes in all directions, like a novel without a plan, gravitating where it will, as the inspiration and its physical possibilities take it, and without the comfort (the reassurance) of the line on which writing shores itself up. Standing firm, bust downwards, head tilted towards the floor, Banier works without an alphabet and with no thought of communicating, of formulating his sentence in the right order, as the mind is supposed and summoned to do. Precedence goes to rhythm, to the impetus and drive of the senses, through the energy from which these Fauve colours surge forth. And indeed, it is not inappropriate to mention the Fauves here, who were described as such because of their barbarism, their “savageness”, the rawness of their palette.
With a sensual ardour, François-Marie Banier attains what was accomplished by other great writers such as Henri Michaux, whose pictorial work is of the first order, or Roland Barthes, who “Sunday-painted” for relaxation. Banier’s canvases are the product at once of music and dance. One cannot but be touched by this long journey that, in gradual stages, led a writer who became a great photographer to painting. By becoming a painter, Banier is harvesting the fruit of years of efforts to shake off the child prodigy image that sticks to him and that, in his maturity, he seeks to disown. What he has undertaken spontaneously, with wild, impulsive generosity, is to attain the silence of the wise before which he struggles and cries out like a diver holding his breath for a descent to the abyssal depth of the oceans, which is also a return to what is best in himself.
François-Marie Banier’s adventure with words, people, images, forms and colours has only just begun. Burning with desire to at last be modern by ceasing to be romantic, he, who says he was born without origins, continues with all his strength with abnegation, perseverance, probity, rigour and sensibility, to invent his own horizon. Who would suspect the “elegant and supposedly spoilt young man” in the gaudily painted, hooded joke terrorist of that barely recognisable 1998 self-portrait? After more than thirty years of active, unbroken practice, it is time to see the photographic work of François-Marie Banier as an accomplished whole of rare originality, the work of a modern classic, to be admired for itself, in its prodigality, its rigour and its beauty, quite apart from the compelling personality of the man who makes it be.

Patrick Roegiers
Saint-Maur, 22 june 2000

Translation : Charles Penwarden.

(1) Unpublished interview with the author, Paris, 15 March 1994.
(2) Idem.
(3) Marie-Dominique Lelièvre, “Le bouquet de Narcisse”, Libération, 4 August 1997
(4) Henri Michaux, “Postface”, Plume, (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).
(5) Interview with Martin d’Orgeval, Paris, 3 November 1999, in this catalogue, p.34.
(6) Idem, p.34

All other quotations are from François-Marie Banier’s various books and catalogues.