"Inside out"

L'Envers du Dehors

Despite the pleasure I take in writing, I find it hard to find precise words with which to elaborate on my own images. Images are ubiquitous in today’s world. How can I explain my own visceral need to follow suit and get to grips with the world in this way ?

I approach my work silently in something of a photographic mood, available to all that is visible. I find my subjects in my immediate environment and on my travels to big cities. It is cities that excite me most.

My pictures arise from the creative space between photography and life, between two obsessions: the first formal, the second intuitive. An inward and outward nomadism, engendered, no doubt, by my readings of Kenneth White. My obsessions hover between photography and the photographic, between form and meaning.

I work like a man on the move, often finding myself in unexpected places. I have a questioning attitude, snooping near and far, always on the alert, as Henry Miller said of Brassai. My images are not premeditated; you could describe my work as direct photography. As I roam from place to place, being a photographer means I must redefine my inner position towards reality with every shot, just before the shutter opens.

People say of my work, "There seems to be something there, but it has already gone ; whatever it is escapes and tends to disappear.’ Applied to my cityscapes, this ‘what was’ formula has always appealed to me because it sums up the very act of photography. As for taking photographs while travelling, this is a privileged way of living, attentive to the world, linking an activity with movement as Gilles Mora said of Bernard Plossu. A different way of writing, with light a way of making sense of the world.

Text has become omnipresent in my work; photography is better than any other medium when it comes to grasping rapidly half-glimpsed words. The photographer become writer, framing short visual poems, haikus, more to be meditated on than read. It is almost a case of taking photographs to avoid having to write.

In my formal experimentation, I seem to be attempting to grasp what is fleeting and sensitive in the photographic matter (blurred, spun out) or to be telescoping the presence or absence of beings and places that merge into one another to the point of abstraction – mirrors, screens, reflections, torn posters, images within an image, words cut short, reframed, out of sync, effaced, double-exposed, superimposed, baroque accumulations or signs. To see everything at the same time is to see too much or, perhaps, to see nothing. And when the job of deciphering is done, what remains to be read? Words, letters, objects which refer to the history of photography and that of the photographer. Since Robert Frank, it is in any case agreed that anything done in photography can only be subjective, as if the only valid subject for the photographer were the self-portrait. Must this mean that photography – the art of the replica – reveals hidden narcissistic tendencies?

I like the plastic and intellectual double meaning of a formula that expresses an action which is past but affects the present. I would sum up my preference for the ‘duplicity’ commented on by the semiologist Jean Arrouye as the pleasure I take in composing images and offering a uniquely personal vision of the world. Each of my photographs is, I hope, both a portrait of the outside world and a self-portrait : the inside of the outside.

Raphaël Dupouy

Biography

Born in Versailles in 1963, Raphaël Dupouy lives and works in Le Lavandou in the South of France. A former student of the Fine Arts school of Saint-Étienne, he practised photography when travelling and in cities at night before settling in the Var. Having had several jobs, from barman to journalist, he returned to his first love – art – in setting up the association Réseau Lalan in 1995. In addition to organising cultural events, he continues to take photographs all over the world and to carry out personal work in black and white and in colour. He exhibits his images regularly and has published several works combining text and photographs. This catalogue was published to coincide with his first retrospective exhibition, held at the Centre d’Art Sébastien in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer in 2010.