PLEASURES & TERRORS OF LEVITATION II
(point of no return)
When one has taken the leap of life, of one's life, there is no going back. You have to move forward, up, down, simply live. You have to deal with his contradictory feelings of pleasure and terror. And you can’t go back.
The only moments when one can escape this fatality, abstract oneself from this perpetual movement, are those which are often called “out of time”. It can be an ecstasy in front of a landscape, a loss of faculties during a romantic encounter, or quite simply this piercing feeling in front of a work of art.
For these bungee jumpers who know the terror of the fall followed by the joy of weightlessness, there is this moment "out of time", brief and sublime, between the ascent and the new fall, where one floats , nothing moves and we savor the suspended time. I call it levitation.
"This guy was a diver, but he wasn’t a diver. He was levitating as if in a dream state, and then I knew what I was after."
Aaron Siskind, 1978
LEVITATION II prints
Format: 42x60 cm // 16.5 x 23.6 in
Prints: Pigment prints on Baryta Fine Art paper – UV protected
Edition: 6 + 2AP
Printed, signed, dated and numbered by the artist.
STATEMENT
When one has taken the leap of life, of one's life, there is no going back. You have to move forward, up, down, simply live. You have to deal with his contradictory feelings of pleasure and terror. And you can’t go back.
The only moments when one can escape this fatality, abstract oneself from this perpetual movement, are those which are often called “out of time”. It can be an ecstasy in front of a landscape, a loss of faculties during a romantic encounter, or quite simply this piercing feeling in front of a work of art.
For these bungee jumpers who know the terror of the fall followed by the joy of weightlessness, there is this moment "out of time", brief and sublime, between the ascent and the new fall, where one floats , nothing moves and we savor the suspended time. I call it levitation.
It is time stolen from time. It is also a metaphor for photography, a sublime means of making life levitate: no matter the chaos before or the promise of love after, photography removes its subject from the continuum of life, it levitates him forever.
No eternal levitation however in Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation. In Aaron Siskind's series, when we look at these divers frozen in their descent, we know that what follows the shot is the final fall, such as the fall of Icarus. In Point of No Return, jumpers fall, levitate, then fall, rise, and levitate again. And even. They are drawn into a long series of pleasures and terrors interspersed with brief moments of suspended time. They are projected into a vertical metaphor of life.
ABOUT AARON
If the title Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation (Point of No Return) explicitly refers to Aaron Siskind's series, I discovered his work long after completing my project.
Aaron Siskind's series, titled Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation, shows divers jumping into Chicago's lake. It represents bodies freed for a moment from the laws of gravity describing a very particular geometry on the white canvas of the sky. The photographer has produced a large number of images which are often presented in groups of 4 or 9, creating a very strong visual effect, reminiscent of an alphabet or abstract painting.
In a 1978 interview, Siskind explained what attracted him to divers: “I was walking along the lake in Chicago, and I saw these guys jumping off a diving board. It was a beautiful Sunday, and I was just walking along with my Rolleiflex. I sat down and started taking pictures of them without knowing exactly what I was doing, only that I was taking pictures of divers. The results didn’t particularly interest me until I looked at one that struck me. This guy was a diver, but he wasn’t a diver. He was levitating as if in a dream state, and then I knew what I was after.
It is the coherence of Siskind's approach that is striking: “This choreography of suspended bodies joins the concepts developed in the rest of his work. We find in it the gesture of decontextualization, the graphic and abstract treatment of the body, the dramaturgical dimension, the serial protocol, the importance given to visual rhythm, defamiliarization and the challenge to time. (Mathilde Arrivé cit. Aaron Siskind, une autre réalité photographique)
I discovered the work of Aaron Siskind through his Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation series which I saw a few years ago at Paris Photo. The shock was far beyond the proximity to my work on bungee jumpers. Yes, of course, 60 years apart, my series represents a modernized version: divers are replaced by technology and elastic. But it was when I discovered the rest of Aaron Siskind's work that I had this strange feeling of discovering an almost family closeness to my approach and my vision of photography. Throughout his career, Siskind has used photography to transform familiar landscapes and surfaces – sidewalks, graffiti, chipped posters, isolated figures – into abstract forms that invite the viewer's imaginative projection. This is exactly what I have been trying to do since I became a photographer: to see in the banality of everyday life, forms, repetitions, that show the viewer the possibility of beauty, of art in everyday life. In our lives. Re-enchanting the world through photography.
This is why I decided to call my series Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation (Point of No Return). Like a fraternal greeting to Aaron Siskind, a photographic friendship through time.