BY DIETER DEBRUYNE
1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?
I took my first pictures – like I consciously want to take a photograph as an image – when I was about 15 years old. I had to do some homework for a new media class I took back then. I remember strolling through the parental garden, photographing flowers and all kind of things that you can come across in a garden. Before that, I had occasionally taken some pictures of kids, Nathalie Nijs during holidays, celebrations and family gatherings with my father’s Canon AE 1, which actually was a big thing. I felt significant like Nathalie wrote, because film only provided limited number of exposures. It was a serious thing back then, you did not have the liberty to fool around like you can today.
© Armand Quetsch
2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?
Well, I guess I started fooling around with the camera, but the approach to photography is of course totally different from what you do as a kid with a camera. Perhaps I took it a bit too far back. I really started photographing after I finished “Le 75”. While studying, I was too influenced by all this new stuff I was confronted to. I was really impressed by all this “Düsseldorfer Schule” thing going on in the late nineties, early noughties. My first contact with this was an exhibition I saw in ‘95 at the Casino Luxembourg, called “The 90s:A Family of Man?”. They had included some beautiful prints from Roger Wagner, Rineke Dijkstra and many more, and I was totally stoked by the intriguing beauty of this photography. Sharp, precise, with prints where you could almost step into that confronted you like only reality can. I did not understand the technical complexity behind these images but was totally under their spell. After years of trying to get to this quality, I liberated my work with going digital. It allowed me to get a more playful, permissive side to image production that I did not have with the very technical large format, documentary-style influenced photography I was doing. The digital camera was meant to take photographs more easily of the everyday things I was living. Not in an artistic approach, but in a normal, popular, democratic use of photography, which is to stop time and collect/create memories.
3. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?
Digital has opened photography an ease of use that it never had before. But this probably is some kind of Pandora’s box. Never there was as many good photography, but never before this quality got lesser attention than in our fast paced digital days.
Regarding social networking, it is probably the most overrated thing we came across the last decade. Ok, you get information about almost everything, but in general things exchanged on this platforms don’t go beyond the futile when it is not a specialised blog like this one. Knowledge gets drowned in information. All is accessible, is just a click away. This is a chance but also a huge dilution.
The chance to get your work out of course is given, but does this really bring you opportunities? You better go out there a meet the people in charge for real.
4. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?
My personal research is one of the pictorial values of the photographic image. It is always, in the first line, a questioning of connotation and the independent communication of the photograph. It is a hate-love towards photography and a disbelief in its ability to register and inform on a same level. On a second level comes the photographic investigation of the territory, may it be Brussels as in the collective work of Projet: BXL, realised during a residency at Contretype with Sarah Morissens, Luca Etter and François Goffin, the personal and intimate “territory” in the ephemera series or images of European Landscape - built on a matrix of violence, war and crisis - in the last series called Dystopian Circles / Fragments…all along.
© Armand Quetsch
5. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?
Absolutely not. Of course I have a tendency to work in 4x5 inch format because of its quality, but the prints are digital. I have used all kinds of cameras and formats until now. Predominately it is about the pleasure of photographing, may it be with a Polaroid camera, a digital Canon, the Pentax 67 II - that I specially cherish - or my Linhof Technica and Sinar camera.
6. Tell us about your latest project Dystopian Circles/Fragments… all along?
DC/FAA is a long-term project. I love being slow in my production. Images have to be taken, then printed and looked at for quite some time before I can really tell if I want to get it out or not. The project really got form after a month-long trip to Lampedusa. I wanted to produce something that made sense, sense in terms of fitting my personal/political view of what surrounds us here in Europe’s wealthiest part. But primarily, the work I have been doing since 2010 is merely about questioning the medium. The title Dystopian Circles is both about what is depicted and the relation of disbelief in the assumed capacities of photography to tell 1000 words. It does tell something, but not necessarily the story extruded of the “reality”. A picture of a lobby of a crematorium of Dora-Mittelbau, doesn’t tell you a lot of things if you don’t get the meta-text. But all of my pictures come short of exactly this information. This is one side of the “dystopic” relation towards photography. What interested me in this series was to photograph places of violence like this lobby, the sea seen from Lampedusa to the south, or the Balkans, landscape of the last (official) war in Europe (a picture of the Fort of Srebrenica – the medieval one, not the Battery Factory- just because of the tension in the conception that you could get) Landscapes linked to austerity and the crisis, primarily in Greece and Italy.
© Armand Quetsch
7. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, who influenced you in some way?
Influences in photography are probably very large. As I am collecting books for over ten years now, most of the photography I’ve seen is on paper. I don’t really know what is going on in the digital world; I don’t have tumblr, twitter and all this. I follow photographer’s work in a classical way; I buy a book or go to see a show. For me printing qualities still are an issue. These backlit images on screen tend to be too flattering to the eye and mostly lack the resolution and size to be fully appreciated.
My influences definitely are z.Z(t) volume II from Dirk Braeckman, the MOMA publication on Gursky from 2001 - one of the first books I bought – Kuroyami from Sakiko Nomura, Vinter from Lars Tunbjörk or books such as the beautiful Trying to dance from JH Engström. But the list is probably way longer because the photographic image has the ability to get caught somewhere in your neuronal system as it is so close to the experience of vision. Of course there are shows that I’ve seen that left a trace, but the most important is probably the above-mentioned The 90s:A Family of Man? at the Casino because it was some kind of trigger.
8. Three books of photography that you recommend?
In recent books, I would definitely recommend Proliferation from Geert Goiris, Die Mauer ist weg from Mark Power andField Trip from Martin Kollar.
9. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
Echolalia: Ana Torfs at the Wiels was a really interesting one. You got a lot of input and she made impressive use of the possibilities of the photographic image. The Berlinde de Bruyckere show at SMAK. You just shut up and look at this work. It is so powerful.
And, ok, it is not a show, but I had a really nice experience with Paul Gaffney, Colin Pantall, Fabrice Wagner, Philippe Malcorps and Pierre Liebaert at Tharoul, where they produced a single-copy book. I had the chance to spend an evening with them, the night the book was hand-made by Pierre! A beautiful experience with nice people and a wonderful work produced.
© Armand Quetsch
10. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
DC/FAA is the project right now. I am finishing the editing and preparing the first dummy for book that should get out this year.
I am also working to install a Project-Space in Luxembourg with noema, an organization which was founded by Francois Goffin and myself a few years ago and that now has moved to Luxembourg an got support from other people, such as Daniela Del Fabbro, a former curator from the CNA in Dudelange – an good place for photography that should be better known. They produced the well-known Coexistence series from Stephen Gill and this year Paul Gaffney will be there for a few weeks to produce new work.
We also prepare a show for the Biennale de photographie en Condroz with a photographer, unknown to the public, but with a really interesting production in photography since the 80’s. I hope it all works out.
11. What’s your relation to Nathalie Nijs?
I am not having a specific relation to Nathalie Nijs; we only had the occasion to show our work at the Artwall event organized by Peter Watershoot in December 2014. When I mention her it is first of all because it struck to read about how close our first experience in photography were. There are some intersections in our approach to photography for sure.
© Armand Quetsch
12. Tell me some things about ‘Le 75’.
Le 75 was a lucky match for me. I had already been accepted in a school in England and, at the last moment, I hesitated and was thinking about going to Brussels. It was just the perfect experience for me; it was more about sharing things, about a bunch of friends, than actually being in a scholar structure. The environment was quite free and permissive and gave just the right amount of support to the students that they needed, or wanted. Coming out of the 75, we wanted to continue with this kind of dynamics and started the “Projet : BXL”, which was realized over the next year within the residency program of Contretype. We got the supported by MonsieurJean-Louis Godefroid, a huge but probably underestimated force in Belgian Photography. He was the first to show people like Robert Mapplethorpe in Europe, gave residencies to people like Elina Brotherus or JH Engström when nobody even had heard of them. I had the chance to meet people that cared, at the 75 or right after my studies.
13. You’re referring to ‘The 90’s : a family man. Why is this so important?
It is more important than other shows that had an impact, simply because it was the first of this kind that I saw. It was a rich mix of the photography done at that time and left a big imprint in my innocent mind back then.
14. You told me you work in well-named territories. Why do you limit yourself to certain territory?
It probably is a protective reflex I have in order to not lose myself in a massive production where I never would find an end to it. I need a certain kind of constraint to be able to focus myself on one thing. I tend to be a bit disjointed. So to keep things free and diverse but at the same time related to each other, I have to set a frame that provides me structure.
© Armand Quetsch
15. Can u tell me more about NOEMA?
NOEMA is a project with people from different backgrounds who just wanted to organize things in the cultural and artistic domain. We needed an association of our own to simply be able to get to height of our ambitions. We were tired of waiting for others to offer the things we wanted to be done. So we are currently trying to give us the means to do so. But it is probably too early to get precise on this topic, as we are moving the organization to Luxembourg and want to get things really rolling for autumn this year.
16. How do you see the future of photography in general evolve?
Photography as a technical medium has seen a lot of development in the past years. When I started, digital was not really an issue – the first consumer cameras with 5MP were arriving on the market, quality was lousy and prices too high – but things have changed at a tremendous pace. Since a couple of years we are at the point where digital and analogue are mostly at eye level. So this technical issue should be off the table and it becomes more of a stance of personal taste than the need for highest possible quality.
This transition to a digital tool has freed photography of a lot of restrictions, may they be financial, time-related or of craftsmanship. Things have become much easier than they were 15 years ago. Today a lot can be done within three clicks, things that needed knowledge of a specific technique and time. Filters are probably the biggest and most dangerous advances in digital photography that we have seen the last years. Mediocre photographers can achieve a lot of things by chance and do not necessarily have the comprehension of what they actually are doing.
© Armand Quetsch
But all of this is to get to the point that photography today is freer than ever before. You can work with wetplates, you can only work with web-based images, you can cut old pictures up and do collage, and you can still be a documentary photographer or just call yourself an artist. The field of the artistic practice with, or within photography, are today liberated of all sorts of constraint and therefore come closer to classic notion art.
The digital aspect of photography will ensure the biggest evolution of the medium. Photorealistic images, completely constructed in the computer, will probably be the next thing getting attention. We will get closer to Hollywood and leave behind the old segregation of the Art and the Photography. But I am happy to see that there still is a place for good old classical photography. The philosophical aspect of indexicality and proximity to reality will be completely irrelevant to the next generation of photographers, but photography – as craft that paints with light and not with electrons – will continue to have its place. The division that separated photography from art until the 80’s will never fully disappear and we will have both ways of handling the medium and its history. Both are appropriate. Photography will get more of a material that you use and the “creative photography” will, from now on, have a certain nostalgic connotation stuck to it.
© Armand Quetsch | urbanautica Belgium