Raymonde April
Debout sur le rivage, 1984
- Artist
- Raymonde April
- Title
- Debout sur le rivage
- Dimensions and medium
- 9 silver gelatin prints, 100 × 934 cm (overall)
- Artwork description
- Raymonde April’s photo suite Debout sur le rivage—whose title is taken from the unfinished novel L’Homme sans qualités, by Austrian author Robert Musil—presents an alternating sequence of five portraits and four landscape photographs in black and white that evoke various formal and semantic associations. The portraits feature masked characters, their faces hidden behind various items including a protective slide sleeve. This fascination with unusual things serves to disrupt our gaze and guide our understanding of the work toward the very nature and function of the surrealist mask. References to art and its representation are inevitable. In this piece, photography itself becomes the subject, reflecting the artist’s passions in an original reformulation of the portrait genre. Grayscale landscapes, shot horizontally and with a photographic blur, combine with the striking, vertical presence of individuals masked behind symbolically laden objects to create a topography of the imaginary and an intimate mythology.
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