Collection Pickpocket by Giller Berquet
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Gilles Berquet : Viewer and « voyeur »
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by Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
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Photography allows one to postulate a certain truth about the body that is far from being purely entertaining or of practical utility. In the instant of pressing the shutter release, Gille Berquet faces the greatest possible decision. He anticipates what photography offers his lens that he does not want to betray. He never treats his subject, the woman, as an object, even if his photographs are unable to overcome the woman’s mystery. The photographs do more than writing may ever say or show. They filter the core of the female secret, her native shade of which the human being never gets tired and may never understand.
Guilles Berquet
The muses escape the time and space of the mundane. In front of these women’s images, the viewer becomes “voyeur,” the image in front of the viewer, and the viewer in front of the image, which introduces a distance between viewer and himself. It becomes an internal affair, a solitary person at the moment of meeting that escapes onanism. There is indeed in every photo, by effect of “scénographies,” a critical distance that removes much of the moral sense in the soul of the sinner. However the work is not at all a denial of Eros. Quite the opposite; but it returns in resistance with what it allows more immediately – to create pressure on the viewer-voyeur’s part that he may not even be able to identify.
Gilles Berquet, « Pickpocket »,
Editions Derrière la Salle de Bain, Rouen,
« Blow-up Sessions », Editions Chez Higgins, Paris.
Click here to visit Berquet’s website.
About the reviewer:
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perrett writes about music and the visual arts. Born in 1947 in Chambery (France), he was a professor of communication at the Université de Savoie. He has published several essays, mainly about Samuel Beckett and painting, and short fiction, most recently Labyrinthes, Editions Marie Delarbre.
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