IDOLS AND SACRIFICES
1989 – 1991
Idols and Sacrifices mark the end of a long cycle of abstraction, idealisation, that had led from the first pleasant times on the beach to the gold haze of the Chambers. The end also of an innocence, a magic confidence in the power of the image, in that “leibnitzian” idea that every image contains all others, contains the world.
Dressed up as a sort of back-to-basics of photography, back to the classic genres, — the Portrait and the Landscape — Idols and Sacrifices constitute a laying-bare, a radicalisation, a simplifying of the means that will take me to the End Of The Image. The wish to face, once at least, the body only, beauty without artifice. The wish to answer in my own way the question of the living: since the living cannot be photographed, we will try and photograph the gods!
The red landscapes imposed themselves later, because Idol and Sacrifice make up an inseparable couple, and also as a metaphor of the powerlessness of photography, of its incurable deficiency faced with the intensity of the living — the red of Sacrifices becomes the wound, the despair of photography itself.
