The time of a space

«If time has always begun, our imagination has an imperious need to come up with spatio-temporal reference points; usually we have to mark the beginning of a story and a place able to embody the instant of crisis: the beginning – as if we had to grasp onto something palpable in order to exorcise destiny's terrible quandaries.»¹ If, in evoking these words of Jean-Toussaint Desanti, we are able to cut directly to the core of Didier Ben Loulou's photographs, it is doubtless because of the close, almost visceral ties which the artist has woven between his determinate aesthetic approach and a territory strictly limited to the old city of Jerusalem. It is the strength of this relationship that gives birth to a work which explores the inner sanctum of a city and of several historical sites situated on the edge of its ramparts. During hie almost daily walks through the different quarters, juxtaposed within the walled city, the photographer has inexorably put its reality together, linking series, image after image, for close to ten years now. He has produced, as he puts it, a sort of deambulatory typology of the city of Jerusalem.²

The application of this previously established rule imposes the unity of place, the metrics of exposure time, the simplification of gestures and decor, and the symbolism of facts on the artist. It contributes to integrating a tragic, transcendent history into the work, as if it were a piece from a classical repertory. Within the strict and orderly 6 x 6 frame, his photographe bring out anonymous sites and faces, which are revealed on the ground, so powerfully enriched by the original and divine enigma of the monotheistic civilizations.

In his tireless questioning and obstinate quest, the photographer seeks the traces and impalpable borderlines which both separate people and mark out spaces. The land of founding myths, concerned with the place of sacred representations and of the image in religions, the crossroads of bloodstained histories and internecine struggles, of arrogant syrnbols and orthodoxies of all kinds: for any artist, representing Jerusalem fatally becomes an issue of projecting oneself into the elusiveness and complexity of the real, for it is the history of beginnings which remains the standard of measurement.

In designating this unique site as the focal point of his photographic research, Didier Ben Loulou undertakes, on the one hand, «to bring the image back to its prohibition, in the very city where the Word decreed it»³ ; on the other hand, he defends the use of a camera as an instrument of intercession, indispensable to « the consciousness of having-been-there, like a new category of space-time: the immediately local and temporally anterior » – to quote Roland Barthes' definition of the primary characteristics he attributed to photography.⁴

In the course of this re-appropriation of a territory, well-known references and representations to which the site had already born witness are superimposed upon the structural and temporal anteriority which stems from the differed action between choosing a shot and actually obtaining the photographic image, as well as a form of retrospection into the most removed times of the sites history. Whether writers, painters, scientists, archeologists or photographers, a long line of illustrious predecessors – from which no artist can escape – haunt the city's sites.

Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem: René de Chateaubriand's title was to inaugurate, early on in the

Didier Ben Loulou readily distinguishes these inventories – originally motivated by documentary considerations, in the service of the history of the arts, civilizations and archeology – from the series of photographs Auguste Salzmann did of Jerusalem in 1854⁶. A marvelous view, «Temple Wall, details of the workings of the probatic pool», now belies the status of scientific demonstration which, at the time it was taken, credited photography with an absolute identity between the object and its image. Today, this photograph stands as one of aesthetic triumphs of nineteenth-century photography. Auguste Salzmann, who rejected the title of photographer, proclaimed himself to be an historian in order to lend credence to the controversial theses of the archeologist Félix Caignart de Saulcy. To this end, he used tightly framed shots, whose rigorous frontal sighting banished all anecdote and expressed the texture of the stone, the fragments of sculptures and the bond of the wall with astonishing graphic power, using the effects of contrastive lighting. His own intentions notwithstanding, his approach turned out to be innovative.

As opposed to Auguste Salzmann, Didier Ben Loulou refuses to show archeological sites, ancient architecture and the Holy places, though it cannot be said that he avoids them either. He merely shuns the picturesque. Didier Ben Loulou's fascination for Salzmann's images cannot be measured by the formal resemblances which are to be found between their respective works, but in his consciousness implication of his way of working in the same archeological domain where, as he sees it, the memory of people and places are the object of his research, his aesthetic mastery of photography his means of expressing it.

To Auguste Salzmann's panoramic vision of Jerusalem, which was to bring him a medal at the 1855 Universal Exhibition, Didier Ben Loulou opposes fractured moments, split spaces, troubled moments – in short, a conglomerate of caesura which culminate in no synthetic vision of the city. «Different times different phrases, to each century its ink»⁷: to the triumph of the unique and global point of view of a panorama which so thoroughly satisfied the nineteenth century, Didier Ben Loulou offers us the fragility of images which «weave amongst themselves a necessarily badly stitched mosaic of fragments. They reveal wounds and traces left on the ground, on the walls, like so many palimpsests to be decrypted; the scattered remains of buman desires which have reverted to indifference»⁸. To bring out the difficulty in rendering chaos coherent, no site is named. The photographer abstains from entitling images separately, in that way better reinforcing the emergence of an entity merely dreamed of, or paradoxically of a reality brought out by the image alone: photographic Jerusalem.

«When a photographer takes a picture, what you see is only ever a piece taken from a whole: the edge is just as interesting as the center; you cannot but imagine a whole of which the portion you see strlkes you as baving been chosen by chance.»⁹ In 1859, Eugène Delacroix reproached photography for its fundamental need to cut a fragment out from the real in order to give body to its representation, because he was still opposing photographic expression with a pictorial process. With an acute sense of framing and of what is happening outside the shot, Didier Ben Loulou's photography thoroughly asserts itself as a denial of the reality which it divides up like a puzzle. The separated elements are cited one after the other without any apparent links and it can only be hoped that the sum of the parts will define a whole: the solution to the enigma. From the visible offered up to our view, we still have to deduce the invisible part of the images, and take account of the intersticial spaces. The isolated image is perhaps in this case merely the result of a traumatism – the traumatism of the gaze whereby what is outside the frame is a territory of the unspoken. The whole is made up of an assemblage in the form of a rebus where things and people can be reduced to their values as formal and semantic signs. If everything cannot be symbolized, what is left over is sublimation.

«Making light with colors»¹⁰

Since the end of the eighteenth century, and throughout the following century, in the wake of Bonaparte's Egyptian and Syrian campaign, and the subsequent support given by intellectuals for the independence of Greece, the previously indispen­sable and traditional sojourn in Italy came to be supplanted slowly but surely by the trip around the Mediterranean – with the obligatory stops in Egypt and in the Holy land. Europe, then in the throws of romanticism, sought to dazzle itself with putting on impressive stagings of a hallucinatory image of faraway countries: orientalism! It was characterized by color, the proclamation of the decorative and picturesque notation in its images. Eugène Delacroix's romantic palette owed much to the luminosity and the wealth of colors which he discovered on an excursion to Morocco he made in 1832, just as, eighty years later, the integration of decorative elements into Henri Matisse's pictorial space was largely based on the impact of his stay in Tangiers.

In the face of such references, Didier Ben Loulou correctly emphasizes that his « purely photographic will bas nothing to do with nostalgie of the aesthetic categories of another era»¹¹. The orientalist photo­graphers of the nineteenth century, though powerless to do anything about it, bemoaned the monochromy of the photographs which led Francis Frith to say winsomely that «if only the sun painted in color on our magical plates of glass...»¹² and to regret moreover that the shots which he took in the Orient «without color, did so hale justice to its piquant charm»¹³.

Paradoxically, up against Didier Ben Loulou's systematic use of color, we are happily dis-oriented. Not that the artist's aesthetic research was so radical as to lead us to refuse hie pictures, but simply because they provoke a salutary rupture which deprives us of a conventional reference to the Middle-East. The photographic space is no longer framed in such as way as to emphasize the exotic reference marks which falsely document the real; it is the place of the activation, the intensification or the de-coloration of color, rehabilitated in its intimate relationship with light. By excluding local color, he takes the tones of objects as autonomous models and implicates them entirely in the images' construction. A genuine photographic project in this respect. His work nevertheless remains linked with the orientaliste in another respect, stemming from this articulation which the artist-painters, in their day, had managed to establish between light and color, the effects of transparency, the translation of an in-depth space, accentuated by the sweeping contrasts between the zones of intense shadow and of extreme luminosity. An essential component of Didier Ben Loulou's photographs, light functions above all to divide the space and shatter the darkness into scattered spots. This irradiation lingers on even in the half-light, as a dormant luminescence, sufficient to bring a face or a form to life, to daze these people who thus emerge from their photographic nothingness. In this glow, the muffled origin of existence is contained, because even in the deepest black, a sort of subterranean incandescence of light is to be seen, just as in other areas, color stands out in a triumph of light.

Like Caravaggio's humble contemporaries who would embody characters from biblical and mythological scenes in the master's paintings, Didier Ben Loulou's models abandon their gaunt and dusky features and worn bodies. The photographer integrates into his framework the mannerist vocabulary of the monumental immobility of their poses – the expressive gesture of their hands of the strength of an unclad back – in the foreground of a scene. Reincarnating a figure of vanity, a relaxed body in a moment of sleep comes to inhabit momentarily an image of death. Like in Caravaggio's universe, the reds of the cloth burst forth and the photographer magnifies the dislocation of forms by relentlessly taking advantage of the sun as a primordial stylistic element.

«It renders the visible invisible, sheds light on the depths and unveils secrets»¹⁴: it was thus in terms of this supreme function that the photographer Helmar Lerski refers to light. In 1936, he had a show in Jerusalem, entitled «Verwandlungen durch Licht» (Metamorphoses through light). The exhibition was made up of 175 portraits of an anonymous actor, taken on a terrace in Tel-Aviv that same year. Certainly inspired by the very close-up shots and the framing of expressive physionomies in Carl Dreyer's 1928 film, Joan of Arc, Lerski sought to bring out the figures of biblical times and antiquity in the face of the one model he worked with, relying exclusively on his mastery of lighting to do so. It was in this impressive series, where the person's expression is eliminated in favor of the revelation of characters of times gone by, produced through the variations on a single model, that the identity-attributing function traditionally associated with the photographic portrait was thrown into question for the first time. Following along in the spirit of this enterprise, Didier Ben Loulou bas not forgotten that hands, «faces without eyes or voice» in which can be read «memories of our life that have elsewhere been effaced, as well perhaps as some far-off inheritance»¹⁵. In the same way, faces bear within themselves the generic characteristics of people subjected to their history. Through a slow transmutation, the light crosses the sensitive surface of their skins to extract from their flesh the essence of their being, «bringing the eternal hosts of shadow to the day of the living. It accumulates full centuries in the immediacy of the instant. It awakens the grandeur of the unique in ordinary people»¹⁶. Didier Ben Loulou submits these anonymous people, whom he came across by chance in the narrow alleyways of Jerusalem – veritable receptacles of human memory since time immemorial – to the test of photography in order to bring out a pantheon of archetypes.

A stone, as a reminder

In the closing pages of Fear and Trembling, philosopher Soren Kierkegaard recalls what could well be said to describe the Didier Ben Loulou's journey through Jerusalem: «Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human from the previous one. In this respect, each generation begins primitively, has no task other than what each previous generation had, nor does it advance, further, insofar as the previous generations did not betrav the task and deceive themselves.»¹⁷

With no way of knowing if he is at the heart of a beginning or at the term of a civilization, neither reporter nor ethnologist, the photographer has become a man ill at ease in the company of men, preoccupied with the meaning to be given to the filiation of memory in the elusive universe which surrounds him. The Hebraic-inscription-covered tombs he shows, where it is customary to lay a small stone during a visit, are the iterative figures of the photographer's work. The origin of this rite can perhaps be explained through a play on words. The Hebrew word for stone is Even and is written Aleph­bet-noun. These three letters also mean father, Av, and son, Ben; written together they make up the word Even, the stone. To lay a stone is to position oneself as a son in the filiation and memory of the deceased¹⁸. Thus, Ben Loulou, at every step of his way, lays down his images which at once trace his history and come to establish that of photography. He may also recall that «At the beginning was utopies / And the utopies was the image».¹⁹

Notes