photographist

" Picture Mismatch… "

" It is estimated today that consumers in industrialized countries are exposed to some three thousand commercial messages per day. (...) The marketing ambitions of the 2000s no longer stop at the supermarket gates, they embrace the world. It is no longer just about promoting the benefits of the consumer society, it wants to "produce" a new society, another world. (...) Consumption as the only relationship to the world. "

Christian Salmon, " Storytelling " Ed. La découverte, 2007

Involving all spheres of our daily life, both private and public - the novalanguage of communication derived from advertising propaganda colonizes and contaminates the collective imagination and models to its benefit our ways of living together. It also tends to invalidate all the traditional ways of living together that are opposed to its global expansion.This imagination, which has long been built around the great founding myths of each civilization that drew its values and its way of living together from them, is today colonized by commercial and financial powers whose (only) absolute value is the accumulation of money or goods. The whole of human life must be subject to this objective and everyone must subscribe to it - preferably "happily" - even if this means the rapid and irreversible sacking of the entire planet.
To seem less brutal, the methods of this colonization - the colonizer always claiming to do the good of the colonized by (more or less) concealing the profit he derives from it - require a contamination of language, and beyond the consciences and imaginations of both the individual and the collective. (cf. the place of Disney today in the child's imagination, its models have supplanted indigenous narratives almost everywhere).

We are generally aware of the abuse of language in advertising discourse, of the way it destroys or diverts to its benefit the values of humanity, but much less aware of the underground and long-term implications of these games with words.

Often causing confusion in the different registers of language, they tend to weaken the meaning and value of words that can sometimes be used to say one thing and imply its opposite. Propaganda messages - whether advertising or political - also base their rhetoric on a manipulation of images and their codes that has nothing to envy to that of language and which reinforces, generally through seduction, the colonization of our imagination and the contamination of the founding virtues of civilization.

It is in echo to this long-term deadly function that I chose the form of calaveras and black humour. Coming from the depths of time, this skull is a historical sediment, it adorns the half-timbered buildings of the Saint-Maclou aître in Rouen. An ossuary in the Middle Ages, it has long been the location of the city's School of Fine Arts, where I cast it a few years ago?

Marie-Hélène Le Ny, october 2009