hand plays (modified presence series)

 

Modified presence series (19 pictures). Radiography is not simply a matter of scientific discovery, but also a cultural invention, mixing a lot of different know-hows. It’s also an amazing technological device, as three cubic meters of electric equipment are required to control the X rays. Radiographies can be considered a kind of special effect, much like those one can notice in photography and motion pictures. This is the reason why radiography was, at its very beginning, a fun fair attraction.
In my series entitled ‘’Présences modifiées’’, I have adapted to X rays all the tricks used in paintings, photographs, sculptures and motion pictures. By so doing, I have rendered visible to X rays everything those machines cannot usually register: shadows, reflections, the skin –in short all the expressions of our opacity. Or, to put it in other words, all the doubles of reality, echoing our human condition.
Radiography as I see it is a tremendous anthropological tool: it becomes an instrument of observation, allowing us to explore the limits of our visual capacities, the limits of vision: what I see doesn’t necessarily fits what I know, what I would like to see and eventually doesn’t correspond to the real.
This series eventually provides the viewer with an active role, while photography generally considers him a peeper or an absent witness. By putting him in front of fictions or patent illusions, from a cognitive or just sensorial point of view, these pictures give the viewer the opportunity to question the conventions, the beliefs and the phantasms shaping or influencing his own vision. It raises a crucial question about the trivialization of the stimulations and the multiplication of fakes in our society.

 

 

 

 
L’usage de la radiographie sur le corps humain à des fins non médicales est interdit, article L1333-11 du code de santé publique, mention ASN