Do you know the photographer Jacques Payette? His work has just been the subject of four large books with hardcovers and canvas. They are carefully dressed in luxurious paper jackets and assembled in a presentation box. More than a thousand pages, in large format. In one block. A publication practically without equal, even for very big names in photography from here and elsewhere. Here’s sort of an unknown getting the royal treatment. Jacques Payette reveals himself by being hoisted on the shoulders of the Musée d’art de Joliette and supported by the Pierre Lassonde Family Foundation. And it is to John Porter, art historian and museologist, that we owe the rich texts that support his work.
Immersed in these thousands of photographs that almost no one had ever seen before, Jean-François Bélisle, the new director of the National Gallery of Canada, could not believe it. “What I discovered in this universe is difficult to define. Pieces of everyday life stolen from time, as the artist himself says. Not memories, but moments filled with poetry and great sensitivity. »
Photographers with a solid reputation would be more than delighted to see a single book of its kind published for their benefit. Here are four of them… Did Jacques Payette have behind him a photographic work that really deserves to be published? as much ?
A renowned photographer like Michel Campeau was not unfamiliar with Payette’s work. At least Campeau had photographed his colleague’s darkroom, for the benefit of a now famous series which made him known internationally, in part thanks to the enthusiastic support of British photographer Martin Parr. Nothing of this level, however, is guaranteed at Payette. The career of this artist is first attached to a small local notoriety as a painter, even if some of his photographs have been partially unveiled in galleries or by confidential publications produced on his own account. Still, his work as a photographer has never been highlighted on a large museum stage. His mark in photography imposes itself in a way for the first time, like a blow of mass, with this publication of a box of four books. And I’case is not accompanied by any exposure.
feed the paint
For years, John Porter had been convinced that Payette’s work deserved to be known beyond the sphere of friendship that binds him to the artist. Difficult to doubt it at first sight in front of this mass of paper, although the sense of proportion which predisposes to such a publication appears to be somewhat lacking once the surprise of the first discovery has passed.
Why on earth did it take so long to publicize this conscientious photographer’s work begun in the 1960s? “It’s my fault alone,” says Jacques Payette, a little embarrassed, sitting in front of me while I turn the pages of his books in front of him, discovering them at the same time as I discover him.
Even if he devoted a lot of energy to photography and he talks about it with passion, Jacques Payette did not want, he explains to me, to let it take precedence over his painting. Did he consider photography as a minor art compared to painting? Maybe there was a bit of that, at least unconsciously. It seemed to him that a choice had to be made. “I thought, wrongly, I know today, that it would harm my painting, my work in the studio. So he retained his images in the sphere of his intimacy, although he used them as support, for years, to nourish his painting.
the intimate
All of Jacques Payette’s photography is intimate. Here are sections of his family universe that open before our eyes, over more than half a century. Here are the immediate surroundings of his family, presented in its simplest form. Here are his friendships shared with some painters. Here are their workshops. And here are his travels abroad. Here is the nature that fascinates him. The link between all this, in addition to a spirit of the times, is perhaps due to the constant presence of his lifelong companion, Sylvie Gélineau, an artist herself, an accomplice as obvious as she is ardent.
Payette took a close interest in the life of his people as much as in nature, one communicating with the other and vice versa. So much so that he quickly felt the need to use a large format view camera, the only one capable of better capturing the density of a nature that fascinated him. “Vegetation, it is impossible to render all the force with a simple 35 mm. I went from one format to another, non-stop. In painting, it was a bit the same, basically: I went from one format to another, using different techniques, depending on the subjects and what I wanted. »
On the sidelines
His photography took off in the 1970s, at the time of a sort of return to the land, particularly in the arts, bohemian and counter-culture circles. However, one would look in vain in this set for a point of social gravity, of the type, for example, of the one that at the time animated documentary photographers like Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Michel Campeau or Roger Charbonneau. There is no political position there either, although this apparent absence could also be one, ultimately. We are not in the waters of Gabor Szilasi either, gone to capture the four corners of Quebec while plunging into the world of art too.
The fact of having lived for a long time on the margins of urban activity may have contributed to removing him from the surface of the news and concerns of the time. “When Louise Forestier was singing, in Montreal is waiting for me, “Look for me pus in Saint-Martin because tomorrow I consecrate my camp”, we arrived in Beauce to live at the bottom of a row. The family lived for quite some time in Sainte-Marguerite-de-Lingwick, on the edge of the Eastern Townships.
“I have difficulty with social criticism in photography. For me, photography is a more poetic art than anything else. It’s the light that interests me. Even though he is wary, as a painter, of the instability of this light which fascinates him elsewhere. “The studio where I work as a painter has no window… With a window, the light always changed…”
Over the years, his photos have been put aside, but tidy. “When I was sixty, I decided to classify what I had. 100,000 negatives had accumulated. Some groupings have been made in order to produce small works with confidential prints and private.
“My subject has always been the passing of time,” he tells me without the slightest affectation of his work. “It’s always the less spectacular things that attract me. And that hasn’t changed. »
Jacques Payette has had a passion for photography since childhood. “When I was 16, I hesitated between painting and photography. While all eyes are on Expo 67, at Terre des Hommes, he walks through a working-class neighborhood in Montreal. “Instead of standing at the Expo, like everyone else, I photographed in the Faubourg à m’lasse, where my grandmother lived. From this family world he draws intimate, sensitive and moving portraits that touch on the universal.
“When I was young, I could shoot non-stop for six or seven months. More, nothing more. Then I would paint for three or four months. Then the photo again. And so on, over the decades.
He was also enthusiastic about the work of Serge Clément, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Étienne Carjat, Brassaï. He says he has particularly enjoyed, over time, the images of Czech photographer Josef Sudek, always shrouded in shadows and mystery. This influence is in any case felt on some of his images. It is difficult however, through this vast ensemble which runs in several directions, to characterize a style which would be that of Jacques Payette.
His mother used to pull out a cardboard box where the family photos were stored. He loved those moments. “She commented on each photo… Through these photos, she talked about the family’s history. I often asked him to take out the box of photos… I loved those moments. He will have ended up taking out his own box of photographs, a huge box, and thus proposing his own story, woven from the light of his own..