Like a Whisper
Text by Paul Wombell presenting the exhibition Comme un murmure (suite)/ Like a Whisper (The continuation), Galerie Pangée, Montréal, 2011)
How we, the human, engage with the landscape and how we photograph the landscape is far from settled. What we generally call landscape photography now seems very dated, out of time with the view that the landscape is human made, but also that the human is made by the landscape. Conventional landscape photography does not make this interrelationship, but creates a distance between the viewer and the landscape. It brings the sky and land into alignment, to create a horizon from which the viewer can orientate their position in the world. Simply said, the camera places the human body at the centre of the frame and so creates an exclusively human perspective. From this superior position the human is the master over all it sees. Anthropocentrism describes this tendency to regard humans as the central and most significant entities in the universe. Now with a growing awareness of climate change and concerns about global warming this now seems illogical.
However we are now realizing we are not masters over all we see. Other entities in the world have their own agency that act on the human. Water, vegetation and soil, these are the elements that predominantly make-up the landscape that directly affects the human body. These elements existed before the human, and if the actions of humans continue to undermine the ecosystem with industrialization, some might well out survive the human. I think that in the photographic work of Normand Rajotte he is responding to this challenge by unsettling the dominant position of the human in relationship to the landscape. How does he do this?
Rajotte engagement with the landscape is more like a forest animal that is moving through and over the surface of the land. This photographic animal rarely looks up to find the horizon because his world is defined by knowledge and awareness of the locality. His photographic space is not expansive because he predominately looks down at the land and so his images are more groundscape than landscape. He picks out small details – not more than a few feet away from the camera – to build up a mosaic of images to represent the locality. We see the tracks of animals (including humans), trees, mud, leaves and streams. These photographs are grouped together so that no one image dominates, each individual image relates to its neighbor to create a sense of place.
Rajotte’s photographs feel like they are hovering just above the ground and remind me of the NASA photographs looking down on the moon’s surface taken during the Apollo space mission. One image in particular resonates with Rajotte’s approach and brings into focus one of the key themes that feature in his work. On the 20 July 1969 Edwin Aldrin took the celebrated photograph of the first human footprint on the moon, made by Neil Armstrong. Because there is no atmosphere and so no seasons on the moon the footprint could last for a million years. Tracks and footprints are recurring motifs in Rajotte’s work. Where here on earth we have seasons that bring physical forces, wind, rain, snow and sunlight so the marks of footprints on the earth’s surface are transient unlike the footprint on the moon that will last longer then the species that made them. Rajotte’s intimate images of light falling on the ground and the reflections in water are about the passing of time and the transitory nature of life.
The work of another photographer comes to mind. The French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927) who over a thirty year period walked the streets of Paris to photograph doors, windows, courtyards and the inhabitants of the city. It was only much later that we realized that Atget was photographing the decline of the Ancient Regime. Rajotte continues to walk the rural region east of Montréal. Returning to the same area season after season, photographing changes that at the moment might not be recognizable or seen as significant.
Both photographers include their own image within their pictures. You can find reflections of Atget behind his camera in mirrors and shop windows. In one of Rajotte’s photographs you see his hand under the surface of a pond creating a backdrop against his skin so you can see tadpoles. The photographer, the human and the animal, in the picture, interlinked with the landscape. For the moment this is significant realization.
Paul Wombell is an independent curator and writer on photography. He lives in London, UK.