Story 129: Anne Immelé

What is your backstory?

I started taking photos at age 12. I was an avid reader and consumer of images: movies, painting reproductions, magazine covers, fashion photography, LP covers… anything I would come across at the time. Some paintings I saw at the time also affected me significantly. Lucas Cranach’s Melancholia comes to mind, and also Hans Holbein’s portraits at the Kunstmuseum in Basel.

My fascination with laying out, sequencing photos or forming constellations originated during two years of film studies in Nantes and three years ad the National School of Photography in Arles. After Arles, I studied 2 years at the Visual art school at Laval University in Quebec, Canada, where I wrote my Masters thesis about photo sequences. Back in France, I immediately started working in a photo gallery, where I spent five years putting to concrete practice the research I had done about displaying photographs.

While writing my thesis, I was also working on my first photobook WIR (Filigrane edition, Paris) which would feature text by Jean-Luc Nancy. WIR brings together photographs taken in various parts of Canada and the Rhineland. The collaboration with Jean-Luc Nancy eventually continued over the years, eventually leading to "L’approche/ Die Annäherung" (2011), as well as a filmed conversation WIR+10 in 2013.

In 2013 I founded the BPM - Mulhouse Photography Biennial with Jean-Yves Guénier. To this day I serve as artistic director of the festival and curator of some of the exhibitions happening in the festival. Within the Biennal, I have had the great pleasure to work with and exhibit photographers like Anne-Lise Broyer, Pascal Amoyel, Thomas Boivin, Christophe Bourguedieu, Nolween Brod, Esther Vonplon, Kazuma Obara among innumerable others. I’m currently working on Celestial Bodies from the 5th édition of the BPM and on those eyes - these eyes - they fade for Valletta Contemporary (gallery, Malta). For the past 10 years, I have been continuing my personal photography practice while teaching and curating other photographers’ work.

What camera gear/editing setup do you use?

I use medium format cameras such as Hasselblad or Rolleiflex, where you can simultaneously see the real before you and its image on the frosted focusing screen. For this reason, it feels to me like this enables me to ‘share a moment’ rather than ‘taking an instant’.

How do you achieve the look of your photographs and could you take us through the process?

My taking photographs is a very direct, straight forward process, bypassing heavy tinkering with and manipulation of single images. I just develop the film and play with general light and tonality. I also try my best to remove my ‘self’ as much as I can, when portraying a subject. I find it works best when I feel that I am assimilated into whatever I am shooting. In this way, I look for a kind of humbleness in my work, with respect to presenting subjects. Likewise, I would say that I prefer the idea of ‘receiving’ an image that I frame, more than that of ‘shooting’ a picture, if you know what I mean.

I’m fascinated by real situations. The evidence of a single framed photograph is always more complex than it appears, and it’s framed by several layers of time. This is also why I feel a close affinity to the notion of the ‘dialectical image’ by Walter Benjamin wherein past and present are portrayed as a special constellation. My approach to the medium of photography looks past the act of shooting. What happens after, with the images in hand, presenting them, is intrinsic to the process. For me, more often than not, a photograph is not something to be looked at in isolation. It’s always part of a group of images, such as sequences, adjacencies, constellations. This very topic was the subject of my thesis in 2007, which was eventually published as a book « Constellations photographiques » (Médiapop, 2014) about the art of displaying photographs in contemporary photo exhibitions.

There is a ‘tactility’ to photography that I also feel to be very present in what I do. Photographing is not only work done by our eyes (our biological eye, our mind’s eye). It is also a product of the whole body: our movement, our sense of touch, our gestures. It’s a kinesthetic phenomenon in general, also down to the tactile, haptic sense we have of a printed photograph. The direct contact with the materiality of the printed photograph ultimately enables a layered, emotional, and haptic perception. Beyond the concept and the context of the shooting, the presentation of photographs on a wall or in the pages of a book conveys something about the way we approach life. In my case, using sequences and sometimes constellations is a way to convey fragility, turbulence, doubt…
I’m using a medium format camera for recording life and traces of human activities.

At the beginning of my practice, I recorded my own life: making portraits of friends and the like. Eventually I began to broaden my interest to the different dimensions that constitute neighbourhoods and territories. It was a shift from an intimate approach to a more social, environmental role I started seeing for myself as a photographer. I still regard the moment of shooting as important, however it is only one part of the photographic work. Editing, creating sequences, series, choosing the format, the technique of printing and the mode of exhibiting; I find to be just as important to what photography is. I think that ‘relation / connection’ are the key words to my approach towards the medium: ‘relation’ during the shooting and ‘connection’ between the pictures within the pages of a book or in the exhibition spaces.

Could you tell us the backstory of some of your photographs?

‘Les jardins du Risthal’ is a long term project, revolving thematically around a parcel of land owned by my family and friends in an allotment garden.

Bringing together citizens from different social classes and origins, the Riesthal Gardens enable and encourage social diversity around the sharing of a common desire: building a garden and growing its fruits and vegetables. The methodologies of cultivating and growing vegetables (the relationship to this parcel of nature) varies dramatically depending on the cultures and familiarities of respective plot holders. The photo series is about our garden and how we let nature act and overflow. It was a garden in constant re-configuration mainly due to wandering plants. The idea of thinking in terms of a ‘constellation’ was also present in the way the was imagined and organised. Some of the photographs are linked to summertime and children's games. It feels to me therefore that the series reaches back to my own childhood in the gardens. The pleasure of spending time in these gardens is the best way I know to transmit knowledge about the growth of plants and a benevolent attention to all species that sustain life.

‘OUBLIE, OUBLIE’ (Médiapop Éditions, 2020), my latest photobook, is borne out of my lifelong interest in the ideas around transition and territories. I spent 2 years working in Nouveau Drouot (East of France), which is a neighbourhood earmarked for demolition. It was an area where photographers were not usually welcome. Having a medium format camera, which looked fairly old and harmless, helped me. I also gave a photo workshop there some years ago, and one of the participating teenagers has gone on to practice photography. He was a great help for me, introducing me to the inhabitants. He was also talking with them while I was photographing. I didn’t want to have choreographed or posed photographs, so a lot of street portraits were made very quickly, instinctively.