Personal Work
Julien Mignot is represented Galerie Esther Woerdehoff (Genève and Paris), for the series Today, Time is close (2022), Temps présent (2023) and Before the Night is Over and by Galerie Intervalle (Paris), for the series 96 Months and Screenlove.
Temps Présent
“The living being, the breathing being, is the site where atmospheric immersion is transformed into a mesh of lines that proliferate just as, in the forge, the pumping motion of the bellows converts solid mineral into fluid metal; or air inflates the ploughman's lungs that turn into furrows in the earth; or wind that becomes the sailboat's wake; or sunlight that converts into plant stems and roots. In this transformation lies the relationship between lines and atmosphere, a relationship that I believe is fundamental to all animate life.”
Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief Histoy.
Photography is by its very nature instantaneous. What happens when it is deliberately deprived of its function of freezing reality? That's what I discovered when I wanted to take a close look at this horizon that keeps slipping away, deliberately turning my back on the Normandy landscape. It's the memory of time that resides in his images. It settles in throughout the day, little by little, gently bedding down as it passes through the photographic chamber, collecting the sum of all that has existed.
But this sum can only be read as such, and we can no longer dissociate it from the moments that make it up. As we're not hypermnesic, we can't remember every detail of our day either. To avoid going mad, we remember the most memorable moments and a vague idea of the whole of this and all the others we've already forgotten. In the same way, photographing the same frame from lever to sunset in a single image, stripped of all figurative elements, giving each moment the same importance, ends up smoothing out all the details. A boat out to sea, lightning, almost redundant waves, a fertile cloud, the 1,800 triathlon swimmers, a shower, glories, a marvellous sunset, the cold - all will be erased by time. But the final image would have been different if these elements hadn't left their mark on the film. I don't pretend to record a somatic color that conforms to the elements. Each photograph thus becomes the unique memory of the single day that has just ended.
Today, Time is close
Can photography do better than painting? The difference, after all, is that the photographer doesn't paint with colors, but with light itself. Would it be possible to capture this light in such a way that, as in the sky, it is not bound to a surface but permeates an entire volume? In a section of his 1843 book Modern Painters, entitled “On the Truth of Skies”, critic John Ruskin has this to say of the sky: “It is not a flat, dead color, but a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air, in which you trace or imagine short, drooping patches of deceptive light, and faint shadows, faintly veiled remnants of dark vapor”. Isn't it precisely this “trembling transparency”, as Ruskin calls it, that the application of the Fresson technique reveals in these photographs by Julien Mignot? The technique gives the prints a glaze that seems to lift them from the surface. There's no better proof that the sky is not a void waiting to be filled, but fullness itself, in all its infinite variations.
Tim Ingold, April 2023
Before The Night is Over
“Trains across the plain.” Julien Mignot's images evoke something of those words sung by Alain Bashung, in the manner of a point of view: as if the world were seized by something moving, letting through a light of the moment already crossed, already departed, and of which the memory remains. Souviens-toi de m'oublier? These photos seem to whisper. They are, in fact, the fruit of moments of forgetfulness, which exist between the shots of works or commissions. They are the interstices, the loose ends that allow a fragment of life to filter through at a time when there's nothing to do but cross a road, walk a plain, remember to forget, but keep in mind the matter of the glow, through the trees, the bodies, the desires crossed.
Joseph Ghosn
“Before The Night is Over” is in the vein of the ‘96 Months’ series, in which Julien Mignot creates a diary, retaining an image and a track from his playlist over 8 years between 2009 and 2016. Seeing in images and music remains a way of life for the artist, who continues to collect these moments as he moves. As with “96 Months”, the artist entrusts selected extracts from this intimate puzzle to the Fresson workshop, custodian of the charcoal printing technique perfected by Théodore-Henri Fresson in 1899. The chemical emulsion of “Charbon-Satin” paper has retained all its mystery ever since. What appeals to Julien Mignot, apart from the inimitable beauty of these prints, is letting the Fresson family reinterpret their work. The photographer can't control the print, the development process is kept secret, and he can't be present at every stage of production. The artist lets go, entrusts his memory and rediscovers it, far removed from the decisive moment. The sharpness of the photograph has disappeared, crushed under the superimposition of pigment layers. The charcoal print takes us back to the era of pictorialist photogtaphy (1890-1914), inscribing this intimate work in memory. Julien Mignot, himself a collector and keen observer of the contemporary scene, pays tribute to the early days of photography.
Screenlove
“My mother was a concierge, and we lived in the staff quarters under the roof of Beaumont town hall. To see outside, you had to climb some steps: the large openings gave plenty of light and framed the sky perfectly. You had to grow up to see. I used to spend my nights looking at the building opposite. I remember waiting for the accident, but this sample of France was desperately wiser than my adolescent voyeur wishes.
The genesis of Screenlove was already behind my binoculars. I wondered what the updated version of this voyeur liability could be, what had become of that window, light on, no curtain that enthralled my adolescence? The webcam equivalent can be found among live-porn addicts. Exhibitionists inhabited the last page, the top of the list being held by young people living all over the world, exuberant or wise practitioners, organized or independent, evolving as one probed the pages towards local, raw, uninhibited practices. To see or be seen, the modus operandi is simple. For professionals, it's a matter of gathering as many voyeurs as possible behind the webcam, who tip with tokens to trigger or encourage the broadcasters' antics. The amount of tips denudes, fondles, kisses, jerks off or penetrates the recipient solo or in coordination with his or her partner. They are also connected to high-tech toys that vibrate louder or softer, longer or shorter, depending of course on the amount, in the chosen orifice. The presentation pages are reminiscent of the heyday of MySpace, and tell the story of their authors. By opening several windows, you can hear a Colombian man cumming in four voices, while listening to a peroxide American woman play the ukulele, a Japanese woman give voice to her pink connected toy, while a Ukrainian couple play Mario Kart.
At last, I had a world before my eyes, a coded world, populated by Ostriches, barbecues, ratty sofas, bouncy box springs, Eiffel Tower wallpaper or Minnesota hipster skateboard boards. I saw Chilean alektotophiles, Romanian xylophiles, smoking gays, couples in rabbits cutting up their jeans on demand, multicolored dildos, unicorns, pierced perverts, traders masturbating in Rolexes, an Australian cyclist sucking himself, Russians who were fans of Jean-Claude Vandam and a Canadian woman who loved to comb her hair for a long time. All of this in a converted, but very real, setting. I watched intently. Always through a Leica, to preserve the photographic act. I photographed the frame of the screen, in focus, or I got as close as I liked to get into the flesh and reveal anonymity. I recorded hours of rushes. I compiled biographies and archived timelines of enjoyment correlated with attempts at karaoke for English folk fans. I've compiled orgasmic climaxes and the most chilling boredom, I've tried to talk about the whole World without moving from my little screen.”
96 Months
Text by Julien Mignot read by Jeanne Balibar for the 96 Months exhibition.
“After the necessary rest period for silver, I decided to edit the images classified as “miscellaneous” on my computer every month. These images are useless. They are, however, the ones that are closest to me, since they constitute the singular archive of a unique point of view, shifting at every moment.The approach is self-interested. It's not a question of saying “this is what I saw” or “this is what I experienced”, it's a question of observing what remains of a unique moment that we haven't shared, however close or far we may be. What counts in each image is what it evokes for the viewer. It's this little personal story that interests me. See what I've probably never seen, what I thought I'd seen and what you'll probably see, what I'll never see and which will nevertheless be obvious to you.For 8 years I posted a series of photos, a playlist and a text every month. It was a kind of diary. A way of saying, patience, I'm still looking. It was already an interaction with music and writing. In the end, we decided on one image per month and 96 minutes of read text, with the images named after pieces of music.”
