I consider myself lucky to have had, for so many years, a privileged place in Quebec photography. » With Normand Rajotte, Serge Clément and Michel Campeau, Bertrand Carrière is part of a solid generation of photographers. “We must count 45 years of friendship between us. We have always been associated with each other, even if we do not form a group, a movement, a school. »
The artist Bertrand Carrière is not consumed by nostalgia. As his new book comes out, A handful of stars, the photographer however knows very well what he has accomplished over the course of his life. He knows this all the more since he delved into his archives, after having brought them together under a new roof.
“Moving to the countryside allowed me to centralize my work for the first time. When revisiting my archives, I inevitably look a little behind me. Everything became within reach. I’m rediscovering what I did… I consider myself lucky to last. It’s good, already, I know, to have been able to last…”
At the time this book is being published, it is also inaugurating an exhibition around the landscapes generated by highways 10, 20 and 40. In the consumption of speed and space that our lives are now woven into, Bertrand Carrière asks if these expressways can embody a new imagination. His photographs are presented on billboards, on the fringes of these places where we only pass by. The whole thing can also be appreciated as a whole through the dematerialized world of a website, autoroutes10-20-55.com.
A privileged place
Based on a photograph by Bertrand Carrière, Canadian Post published, at the beginning of the summer, a stamp in honor of director Denys Arcand. “It’s great to see a photograph taken so long ago resurface in the public eye. »
His new book is published by a French publisher, a little out of spite. “We almost never hear about Canadian and Quebec photography. What does photography mean in this country? We live in the middle of a kind of desert. There is no real photography publishing in Canada. This is why we all find ourselves publishing abroad. On the international scene, in any case, we do not exist. It’s not for nothing that I wrote this book in Paris. We found the paper in Portugal. It has an interesting feel, warm tones…”
The photographer wanted a book over which he alone would reign. “I did not want, as in most books of the genre, the endorsement of an art critic who comments on what I do, by signing accompanying texts. I didn’t want any of that! This book is a first for me. And I must say that I get great satisfaction from it. »
A handful of stars Don’t throw smoke and mirrors. The work continues a personal work undertaken several years ago. A first part of this work was published in 2016 in a book entitled The sensor (Éditions du Renard). “I spent several years putting together the equipment to The sensor. This new book, A handful of stars, is a bit of a logical continuation. I’m still doing what I started doing there. It’s a photographic journal that I’m offering. I allow myself everything, with devices of all kinds…”
In this very personal project, the photographer crosses his images with a written journal that he keeps in the margins. “I don’t consider myself a writer, but the text is interdependent with the photos. I had the idea of keeping a photographic diary, mirroring moments and fragments of my life, for a long time. It wasn’t really possible to do something like this in the days of film. I was losing track. » If there were too many delays between the shooting and the flattening of the writing to accompany it, in recent years, at a time of technological upheaval, the two have come together more easily.
This new book demonstrates the way in which Bertrand Carrière sees his daily life, always in close connection with photography. Here he offers a sort of personal geography, without pre-established cartography. “For this project, I am in the world of autobiography, of the intimate. I propose, very freely, a film in the form of a notebook, a diary, but without a script. The project is created on the editing table. To organize it, I rely on what I have noted in the margins of these images. A short text accompanies each of the photographs, like a personal diary, but above all in relation to the intelligence of the photograph. »
The artist has traveled the world. He has worked on a number of projects, the dimensions of which touch on the relationship to memory, war, territory, and the fragility of humanity, including for example the failed British-Canadian raid on Dieppe in 1942 (Dieppe, landscapes and installations2006) in Gaspésie (After Strand2011), while establishing himself, through exhibitions, as a contemporary photographer of the highest value. Solsticepublished in 2021, was welcomed as a major work in the world of photography and contemporary Canadian art.
Between private and public
“I have worked on several projects in my life, but this book is very special. It’s on the edge of a border where I don’t go in other projects, somewhere between private and public, while trying to be as anti-spectacular and anti-geographic as possible. » Even if notes in the book locate most of the images proposed, it is true that the whole is in a floating outside of time and place, while remaining in the relative fog of the intimate register. “These are situations that could be found everywhere in any case. I’m far from reporting! »
The forced parenthesis of the pandemic has favored this concentration of the photographer on the intimate side. “I rediscovered the stars in the Eastern Townships sky! The stars that the title evokes are those of this sky, but also the preliminary notes that we give to our images when we classify them in photo software. There is also my grandson who appears in the book, with stars…”
Part of the summer Bertrand Carrière was in an artist residency in Baie-Saint-Paul, as part of the International Symposium of Contemporary Art. The honorary president of the event, the painter Françoise Sullivan, signatory of Overall refusal, celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year. “I found in my archives a photograph of Françoise Sullivan that I took when I was 17 years old. It was for one of my first assignments. She was dancing, but I didn’t know who she was at the time! I was just starting out. I found the negative in my archives. And I printed the photo to give it to him…”
In his early days, like most photographers, Bertrand Carrière worked almost exclusively in black and white. Color has largely taken precedence since then. “There were people who came to see me this summer to tell me that real photography still involves black and white. I’m not at all convinced that this is true. There is courage, I find, in working in color in a serious way, leaving aside the effects and flashes of our time. »
An exhibition around the images that make up A handful of stars, this new book by Bertrand Carrière, is due to be presented next winter at the Simon Blais gallery. This gallery has been supporting the artist’s work for several years. “It will not be everything contained in the book that will be presented, but a selection, a few stars. »