Julien Mignot began his research on the fundamental question of the boundary in 2017. The series Today, Time is Closedissects a corpus of thousands of vertical photographs of the horizon taken from an airplane. At this cruising altitude, it becomes impossible to determine where the gaze is lost. Is it the end of the earth? Is it the beginning of space? Can one arbitrarily define this frontier without relying on any material or chromatic reality? By producing two horizontal prints from the same vertical image, and then deliberately choosing the exact point where they meet, Julien Mignot asserts his own point of view, freed from any external sign. This lip-shaped assemblage, a kind of spatiotemporal distortion, propels the photograph into a third dimension, which until then had been contained solely by the frame.

Can photography do better than painting? The difference, after all, is that the photographer does not paint with colours but with light itself. Could one capture this light in such a way that, as in the sky, it is not tied to a surface but permeates an entire volume? In a section of his 1843 work Modern Painters, titled “On the Truth of Skies,” the critic John Ruskin writes this about the sky: “It is not a flat and dead colour, but a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air, into which you trace, or imagine, short falling touches of deceptive light, and faint shades, the dimly veiled vestiges of dark vapour.” Is it not precisely this “quivering transparency,” as Ruskin calls it, that is revealed by the application of the Fresson technique in Julien Mignot’s photographs? The technique lends the prints a glaze that seems to lift them off the surface. There is 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