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« By its
nature, a photo reflects a single moment, an image of
the past. Occasionally, it evokes the past perfect and
conveys the richness of bygone times. The succession of
visual deceptions in film, not limited by person, number,
mood or tense, confounds the impression of the present
with the sense of on-going infinitives. My images,
caught in the middle and used in a dual sense, capture
the imperfective aspect, the states and structures of
what cannot be expressed as a whole. »
Born in Geneva in 1953,
Jean-Jacques Béguin divides his time between the place
of his birth and the village of Armissan in the Aude. In
2003, developments in digital technologies revived his
interest in photography, a perennial past time. Since
then, he captured countless stolen moments, urban
landscapes, improbable coincidences, reconstituted in
the traditional, rectangular format the camera imposes.
To go beyond these instantaneous and fragmentary images
of the world, his experiments drew on long experience
with the digital treatment of images and led to working
with numerous shots of the same subject, developing a
technique of serial composition.
He progresses through a photographic field with a
measured pace or sweeps through the space in constant
movement. The total of shots taken, often more than 100,
are arranged chronologically in an ever-square perimeter,
then treated for tone, subject and graphic structure of
the whole.
« Jean-Jacques Béguin, with a
candid irreverence for the geometry of things and the
adequacy of tones, sketches a scene, a place, an
itinerary, a trajectory, and gives the visitor a an
illusory yet familiar inventory ,illustrated by an
abundance of images. »
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