Christian Boltanski
[Artist, b. 1944, Paris, lives in Paris.]
I try to find images that are sufficiently imprecise to be as widely shared as possible, vague images that spectators can embroider as they see fit.
... in the eyes of its visitors, Venice has no reality of its own. Anyone visiting the place has already seen so many pictures of it that they can only attempt to view it via these clichés, and they take home photographs of Venice that are similar to the ones they already knew. Venice [is] becoming like one of those painted backdrops that photographers use in their studio.
I hold a mirror to my face so that those who look at me see themselves and therefore I disappear.
I had a score to settle with my childhood. The refusal to die was identified with the refusal to grow up, to become an adult. I wanted to show that situation as clearly as possible. Don’t forget my artistic sensibility derives from my personal mythology. What better medium could I have found, at the time, than photography, which seduced me as a “means” for capturing “truth.”
...the photographer painters have only rarely attempted to use photography alone, in and of itself; they have almost always used it in conjunction with text, either greatly enlarged or in sequence, to distinguish themselves from photographers and show themselves as artists—the brush stroke being replaced by a text.
Everyone recognizes themselves in the photo album.
At first, what especially interested me was the property granted to photography of furnishing the evidence of the real: a scene that has been photographed is experienced as being true…. If someone exhibits the photograph of an old lady and the viewer tells himself; today, she must be dead, he experiences an emotion which is not only of an aesthetic order.
I try to make my art viewed as if it were life, so that people can speak about my art as if it were something they know. This is why I use photos, since everyone can relate to them, and also why I talk about issues like death, which is important to everyone.
