France: “Non-places"

I usually arrive around 11 a.m. The prison is often located close to a commercial area. I buy a sandwich in a commercial bakery. I sit in my car in a parking lot and immerse myself in the place that we just crossed. No one stops there. I stand still like a watchman. I go to the prison at 2 p.m. and show my identity card and explain what I am going to do. An agreement from prison administration is required before taking photographs because they are taken on its property. Normally an email is sent to them. I find myself having to explain that I am not here to photograph the prison and that my back will be to the prison… They think it over for a moment. When they received the e-mail, they alerted the watchtower guards so that they would not think I was snooping and handing out hash and thus get arrested. When I first started the series, I had not asked for permission and was taken away regularly by the cops.

I start studying the area on foot without a camera and go around the prison. I take the walkway and turn. I look for my viewpoint, a kind of visual gap that would make me say: “that’s it.” It is very observational. Then, at about 4 p.m., I come back with my camera and look for the right frame, which takes me an hour or two. I take my pictures at sunset. I took this picture of the Havre in the spring, when night fell around 7:30 p.m. For an hour and a half, maybe two hours, nothing happened. I had my camera on the tripod, lined it up and did not know how the frame would come out in this light. I spotted where the sun was and for two hours, I sat in the grass next to my camera, making mini adjustments.

It’s the light after 7 p.m. that I want. I begin to photograph systematically. Tock, tock, I move, I wait, tock, tock. Car or no car. I photograph automatically, as if I am taking an x-ray scan of what I am seeing. I move my height, my aperture. I start with a normal shutter speed. The more it goes on, the more I go down, down… so that the variation of colours is blended. The evening light has a warm colour variation, and the night light has a cold, rather bluish colour temperature. This purple background is the mixture of a warm colour with blue. For the digital pixel to be able to integrate these chromatic variations, there was enough exposure latency for them to infuse. My pictures are taken hyper-focally, with as much sharpness as possible, with as much field depth as possible. After a while, the night enfolds the scenery, and everything stops. I generally take 250 photos, which are at once all the same and all different. I return home, put them in a sort of catalogue, look at them and about ten of them stand out. I compare them and carry out a detailed selection. I also recorded sounds during my inspection walks. These were displayed in the exhibition. I was thinking of Camus who wrote that you can hear the sea before you can see it. The dunes, the approaching walk, the wind that merges with the sound of the waves, and finally, the sound of the sea itself is self-evident. I was thinking about that with the prison. At the beginning, there is the sound of cars passing by, the birds, then at one point, boom! The prison sound takes over. It is a mixture of clamour, laughter, cries, words, and orders from microphones. It is a bouquet of sounds that is both familiar and musical. A kind of bedlam.

Grégoire Korganow presented the exhibition Close during the 75th edition of the Festival d’Avignon. He talked about it here.