Focus For a very long time, it was impossible for me to look at my archives… My first photograph represents a Sunday painter in Montparnasse, made with a 6x9 bellows bought at the Puces. The print is made by contact using a "frame" in the sink in my bedroom. I was just 13 years old. Looking at old photos was painful, too many memories came back to me, too many missing friends, too many forever past moments, it oppressed me and very quickly I gave up the idea. After the exhibition on the “Nudes” I started working on the “Blur”, with the “Nudes” there were already overexposed or underexposed photos, very white, very black. With the blur, the circle has come full circle: this will be the 4th “Failed” photography exhibition. I like it, it's my freedom… I present you these few photos that only your imagination will be able to finish, the blur is a photograph in the making, it is in progress, fleeting, not objective, it's like an evocation. It's your freedom. But for some time now I had also an irresistible desire for "small formats", small prints that force us to look at them, as if to discover them, as if they were addressed intimately to you, a print photographic that we can hardly look at two, something personal that requires attention. For that, I had to revisit my archives, my photographs of landscapes, beauty, but also fashion or personal. Strangely, it was very fluid, I started by looking at thousands of photographs, making small prints or scans to put them on my wall, in series. You had to live with it, day after day. As I took it off. All those that bored me that I did not want to watch the next day, hop, in a box. I then decided to make the frames myself, as simple as possible, make the prints of 8cm on the smallest side myself, an acid-free cardboard with a clip, a marie-louise, a glass and paper kraft tights. The realization, laborious at the beginning, became easier like an apprentice who learns to do a job. It was like a test; framing a photo is long but it meant that it had passed the test, and I liked this artisanal, precise, repetitive work. It took me two years. I also liked this matter of time, that it is long. So here is the exhibition at Pascal Gabert, it is not "Blur" or "Small formats" it is "Photographs 1971-2016" because it is from 1971 that I officially became a photographer and that I have earned my living. - Jérôme Tisné
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