Art Blart

Exhibition dates: Friday 13th March – Sunday 12th April 2009

 

“The astonishing photographs that make up Hyper involve no digital manipulation, just close collaboration between young dancers and sportspeople as they jump for the camera to form strange, exaggerated poses and body gestures. Denis Darzacq was drawn to the trashy, consumerist nature of the French Hypermarkets (the equivalent of our supermarkets) and the hyper coloured backgrounds they provided. These supermarkets offered a sharp juxtaposition to the sublime, almost-spiritual bodies that appear to float in their aisles.

Hyper is the latest series of works by French photographer Denis Darzacq, who continues to explore the place of the individual in society, a theme which has been crucial to his work in the last few years.”

Text from the ACP website

 

 

Denis Darzacq
‘Hyper #3′
2007

 

 

Denis Darzacq
‘Hyper #7′
2007

 

These images form an interesting body of work: levitating bodies suspended between heaven and earth, neither here nor there, form a hyper-real image grounded in the context of the fluorescent isles of French supermarkets. The mainly anonymous humans look like mannequins in their inertness, frozen at the moment of throwing themselves/being thrown into the consumer environment. After his brilliant series ‘La Chute‘ (The Fall) Darzacq has taken people gathered in a casting call from around the town of Rouen and made their frozen bodies complicit in the mass production of the supermarket and the mass consumption of the image as tableaux vivant: the mis en scene directed by the photographer to limited effect. There is something unsettling about these images but ultimately they are unrewarding, as surface as the environment the bodies are suspended in, and perhaps this is the point.

Suspension of bodies is not a new idea in photography. Jacques Henri Lartigue used the freeze frame to good effect long before Henri Cartier-Bresson came up with his ‘decisive moment’: playing with the effect of speed and gravity in an era of Futurism, Lartigue used the arrested movement of instant photography then afforded by smaller cameras and faster film to capture the spirit of liberation in the ‘Belle Epoque’ period before the First World War.

“All the jumping and flying in Lartigue’s photographs, it looks like the whole world at the turn of the century is on springs or something. There’s a kind of spirit of liberation that’s happening at the time and Lartigue matches that up with what stop action photography can do at the time, so you get these really dynamic pictures. And for Lartigue part of the joke, most of the time, is that these people look elegant but they are doing these crazy stunts.”

Kevin Moore (Lartigue biographer)

BBC Photography Genius of Photography website

 

 

Jacques Henri Lartigue
‘Bichonnade, 40, Rue Cortambert, Paris’
1905

 

 

Jacques Henri Lartigue
‘Mr Folletete (Plitt) et Tupy, Paris, March 1912′

 

 

Jacques Henri Lartigue
‘Fuborg’
1929

 

 

Herni Cartier-Bresson
‘Behind Saint Lazare Station, Paris, France’
1932

 

One of the greatest if not the greatest ever series of photographs of levitating bodies is that by American photographer Aaron Siskind. Called ‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation’ (sometimes reversed as ‘Terrors and Pleasures of Levitation’ as on the George Eastman House website) they feature divers suspended in mid-air with the sky as their blank background canvas. The images formal construction makes the viewer concentrate on the state of the body, its positioning in the air, and the look on the face of some of the divers caught between joy and fear.

“Highly formal, yet concerned with their subject as well as the idea they communicate, The Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation photographs depict the dark shapes of divers suspended mid-leap against a blank white sky. Shot with a hand-held twin-lens reflex camera at the edge of Lake Michigan in Chicago, the balance and conflict suggested by the series’ title is evident in the divers’ sublime contortions.”

Museum of Contemporary Photography website

 

 

Aaron Siskind
‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #37′
1956

 

 

Aaron Siskind
‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #63′
1956

 

 

Aaron Siskind
‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #298′
1956

 

 

Aaron Siskind
‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #99′
1956

 

 

Aaron Siskind
‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #491′
1956

 

For more images see the George Eastman House website

 

Perhaps because of their air of balance and conflict we can return to these vibrant images again and again and they never loose their freshness, intensity and wonder. The same cannot be said of Denis Darzacq ‘Hyper’ photographs. Slick and surface like the consumer society on which they comment the somnambulistic bodies are more like floating helium balloons, perhaps even tortured souls leaving the earth. Reminiscent of the magicians trick where the girl is suspended and a hoop passed around her body to prove the suspension is real these photographs really are more smoke and mirrors than any comment on the binary between being and having as some commentators have suggested.1 There is no spirit of liberation here, no sublime revelation as the seemingly lifeless bodies are trapped between the supermarket shelves, as oblivious to and as anonymous as the products that surround them. Of course the well shot images possess a sense of fun as Darzacq plays with our understanding of reality but are they more than that or is the Emperor just wearing very thin consumer clothing?

M Bunyan

 

 

Denis Darzacq
‘Hyper #2′
2007

 

 

Denis Darzacq
‘Hyper #13′
2007

 

 

Denis Darzacq website

Denis Darzacq ‘Hyper’ images

Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) website

 

            

1. “Denis Darzacq is drawn to the contradictions he sees, or would like to see, in everyday life. Indeed his past series have reflected this — bold naked people walking through bland and conformist suburban housing estates, groups of immigrants in the classic and serene poses found in French masterpieces, French youths appearing mid-flight or mid-fall in bleak, unpopulated urban landscapes.

Darzacq’s practice includes press photography. Just last year he won the prestigious World Press Photo Award. It is intriguing to see how his “anthropological” press photographer’s eye and sensibility makes its way into his fine art work.


His newest series, Hyper, is concerned with the binary between being and having.

Hyper refers to the Hypermarkets (French equivalent to our supermarkets) in which these works are shot. Darzacq was drawn to the trashy, pop nature of the Hypermarkets and the hyper coloured background they provided.


Here he explores the idea of the body in levitation, using straight photography and no PhotoShop tricks. Shot in Rouen with subjects sourced from a casting call in the area, these images offer a sharp juxtaposition, as sublime, almost-spiritual bodies float within that epitome of mass production and mindless consumption.

There is humour here too, as these young people appear to achieve the impossible — levitation — in front of products claiming similarly unreachable outcomes, such as perfect hair, eternal youth, a slim waist no matter how much you eat, a germ-free home……



Not all these bodies are in calm repose, however. There are those caught as if in the aftermath of a violent act — a punch, a throw, a kick, Darzacq tells me that areas around Rouen have had a bad reputation for youth violence — and so here we see this played out quite dramatically, almost ballet-like in the clinical, normally “safe” environment of the hypermarket.

For me, someone who hates going to the supermarket and avoids it all costs, these images are especially surreal — for here they are devoid of the chaos and hubbub of the usual grocery shopping experience, goods are within easy reach, aisles are clear. And in my mind the young man leaping in front of the stack of trolleys is doing so because he has found one without a dodgy wheel and an annoying squeak.


These images are also disturbing. It is hard to believe that they are real — a young man in mid air, snap frozen like the vegetables in the aisle he is hovering above? But Darzacq is playing with us. We are being manipulated, but not in the way we think we are. They are both real (in the sense that the image has not been doctored) and not real, since what we are seeing is the fraction of a second of a body in motion — an image impossible to contemplate in reality.

It is these types of contradictions that of course make life and people  — and photography — so fascinating.”

Amy Barrett-Lennard, Director Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

Barrett-Lennard, Amy. “Hyper” [Online] cited 16th March, 2009 on Lens Culture: Photograph and Shared Territories website.