Raymond Depardon | La vie moderne
Marcel Privat le villaret, Lozère 2007.
©Raymond Depardon/Magnum photos
Written by Luxi H.
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain and Power Station of Art Shanghai present La vie moderne, an exhibition by the French photographer, film-director and photojournalist Raymond Depardon. La vie moderne draws from the photographic archives collected over a span of several decades and contains five different series that focus on French rural areas, farming landscape, and farmers, respectively. Also on view in the exhibition is Depardon’s feature film La vie moderne. Created with Claudine Nougaret, La vie moderne is the finale of the renowned Profils Paysans Trilogy that offers a faithful portraiture of the farmers, their own words, their thinking, and their dignity uncrushed by marginalization and roaring urbanization.
Hérault, Bédarieux, 2007.
©Raymond Depardon/Magnum photos
Depardon was born in 1942 in Villefranche-sur-Saône to a farmer’s family. In his introduction to the exhibition, Depardon keeps “a farmer’s son” very close to his name. Raymond Depardon, a farmer’s son, where his origin functions as an intimate appendix, an indispensable reference to his name, reminds people of the ancient way of naming from the labor days. Cook, Miller, Barber, Fisher, Butler, Taylor, these are the names that are like the crops in the land, bearing the nominal marks of the farmland they grow out of, and a distant memory of the ancestor’s occupation.
Claudine Nougaret, Émilie Quentin et Charles-Antoine Depardon, sur la route de Lapanouse, Aveyron 1989.
©Raymond Depardon/Magnum photos
Starting from the 60s, Depardon has been working as a photojournalist for Dalmas, the French news agency, and later joined the agency Magnum to cover and travel as an international reporter. Decades of news coverage has shown its influence on Depardon’s photographs, and most significantly, it does so by allowing for an intimacy expressed via the lens and dialect of distance. Many of Depardon’s images were taken on his journalist trips, and to find and to maintain a proper distance is prime to the success of reports and photography.
Émilie Quentin et Charles-Antoine Depardon, Caubel, Sainte-Eula_lie-de-Cernon, Aveyron, 1992.
©Raymond Depardon/Magnum photos
The distance between Depardon and his subjects is undeniable. The lens does not try to become part of the scene, neither does it hide from the viewers the subjects’ distrust and reserve: the distrust of the cold, harsh or familiar land, and the reserve of the “wise, philosophic heroes” who are “ahead of their time in terms of the necessary degrowth to come”. For Depardon’s subjects, the prophetic farmers who either with or without intention choose to be away from the modern life, distrust and reserve are a way of expressing their dignity and their belief in their choice of life and land. And for Depardon, to maintain the distance so that the distrust and reserve can be made to breath, is a photographer’s sincere and strategic self-humbling in front of his subjects’ silent and timeless wisdom.
Madeleine Lacombe, Aubas, Dordogne, 1987.
©Raymond Depardon/Magnum photos
Working as a photojournalist, before reminding himself of the social, narrative potentials of his work, Depardon first and foremost warns himself of the potential harm and disaster his media might bring: used incautiously, photography might intrude, might break in, and words might colonialize, romanticize, and write away the precious heterogeneity. To some extent, Depardon himself reflects the tough firmness of his subjects and origin as he insists on using the large-format cameras, often of a colossal size of 8x10 or 20x25. These labor-demanding cameras, in another sense, also work as a physical demarcation to prevent the photographer from stepping into the distance he intentionally maintains.
“These men and women who inhabited and persisted in cultivating these desolate lands were wise, philosophic, and heroes, and ahead of their time in terms of the necessary degrowth to come. The political and ideological shock was a driving force behind my project.”
Le Villaret, Le Pont-de-Montvert, Lozère, 1993.
©Raymond Depardon/Magnum photos
