In her current exhibition The Breath of Leviathan, Douet works on subjects on the verge of disappearing, that are threatened by economic, societal or environmental changes. |
Joséphine Douet | The Breath of Leviathan
an interview by Carmen Line Hust
photo curtesy Inge Tranter The French photographer Joséphine Douet’s (b. 1972) work explores the notions of sacred and savage in the relationship between man, death and nature. She mainly works on the agony of threatened worlds, with a sense of mute violence and magic, displacing reality out of the frame. In her current exhibition The Breath of Leviathan at Vendsyssel Artmuseum, on show til’ June 6th, Douet again works on subjects on the verge of disappearing, that are threatened by change, whether it be economic, societal or environmental. What interests her is the relationship to this disappearance and what it generates in terms of beliefs and reactions. A few years ago Douet bought a small fisherman's house in Vendsyssel and she discovered, at the same time as the extraordinary light of the place, the threat to it. The idea came up to work in a very raw way on this theme and to evoke climate change with the poetic approach of myth, tragedy and sublime. What pushed through the project of Douet and constructed the concept to begin with, started as she started photographing randomly along the coast to find a starting point and let her approach surface and shape through her connection with the subject. Douet walked for days along the dunes to take pictures. It was a process that first came into play when she shot her Andrew Wyeth series for the Thyssen Museum, where she had to walk around Pennsylvania for days. What pushed through the project of Douet and constructed the concept to begin with, started as she started photographing randomly along the coast to find a starting point and let her approach surface and shape through her connection with the subject. Douet walked for days along the dunes to take pictures. It was a process that first came into play when she shot her Andrew Wyeth series for the Thyssen Museum, where she had to walk around Pennsylvania for days.
Walking 20 or 25 km/day looking at every little thing leads you to make incredible discoveries while putting you in a very particular state of mind. Douet had to be able to convey the power of the erosion phenomenon, while moving away from informative photography to transform the subject into something more dreamlike. In her work she always try to approach a level of consciousness that lies between dream and reality. So, Douet also started a long research on the coast geology, as well as collecting many literary and artistic references, from the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) to the Irish-born British statesman, economist, and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797), via the American novilist Herman Melville (1819 - 1891), The Danish sculptor Rudolph Tegner (1873 - 1950), the Italian painter Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571 - 1610) or the Danish novelist Josefine Klougart (b. 1985). Douet ended with the concept of Leviathan, being both the mythical snake from the Bible (and before) that creates a chaos that is going to cause the end of the world; and a direct reference to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, a philosophico-political essay about the submission of human beings to greater power. At that time Doet met Sine Kildeberg, the director of the Vendsyssel Art museum, through whom she decided to build the project, in order to bring erosion to the centre of the museum. The concept is both poetic, addressing our inner child, working on ancestral fears and nightmares, and philosophico-political, with a reflection on the attitude to be taken when faced with the disappearance of our habitat. Douet wanted the project to be accessible to adults as well as children, with many possibilities of interrogations, while opening a very needed discussion. The images are very raw, in a palette of dark colours, and Douet worked a lot on the textures, both in the image itself and on the chosen surfaces, also visible in the catalogue and the text by Klougart, echoing the pictures to perfection.
In the process of Joséphine Douets exhibition The Breath of Leviathan, Douet has both had a project-minded approach as well as letting the themes evolve in a more dynamic and random way. Douet always works on threatened micro-worlds, that tend to prefer a project treatment, with a beginning and an end. Douet favors limitations, as they seem to boost creativity. When Douet worked on bullfighting, while living in Spain, she had to make three different projects to treat different aspects of it and try to understand it. Which she still haven’t completed. Another example is her « Noble Rot » series about decay, which was limited in time as it took place during the French lockdown that lasted 2 and half months. While the projects of Douet are entities in their own right, with an important research component, she also pursue a long-term research on the photographic form. Her work conceives the photographic object as a whole, and she's constantly looking for ways to serve the concept through the form of the work itself. In her current exhibition The Breath of Leviathan, there are images printed on a very matte surface which gives a sandy look to the prints, another photograph has gone through a sublimation process, where she peels the photographic gelatine from the paper support to make a completely new object on glass, another is printed on fabric and then left outside for weeks to undergo erosion itself, yet working on some new photographic objects for when the exhibition goes to Kastrupgårdsamling June 18th - October 2nd 2022. Joséphine Douet always works from an off-set of four or five ideas on the go and then let them settle until one of them takes hold. Doeut usually start with a very clear idea of what she's going to do but then let the environment she’s working in guide her. Since she doesn’t stage her images but is dependent on what she finds, it can be challenging to find the balance between what she’s offered and what she wants to convey. Surprises are constant, and you have to keep refocusing on your initial purpose in order not to be carried away and lose focus. Finding a balance is the keystone of a project. Do not overdo, but also do not underdo.
Joséphine Douet comes from fashion photography, where it is all about composition, where typography is a large part of the image, and the series of pictures has to have a composition in itself. It's a great school where you learn that each image has to stand on its own, and that the whole series has to be a coherent whole. You also learn not to be sentimental with your work, and to kill your darlings. But Douet also come from a family of artists (painters, photographers, musicians, actors...) where composition and balance in a work are a religion. Douet grew up in the middle of the golden ratio. She believes it has become such a part of her photographic DNA, that she no longer pays any attention to it. Douet believes that leaving space to the photographed subject is key to a good composition. In many of her pictures, there are huge skies, or gigantic amount of texture with just a little detail on a side. Letting her ideas breathe. |