MBC: …I wanted vivid, dazzling colors. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, this idea of the father and his relationship with his baby, and in the end, I decided to create images that had great visual power, and that would in a way become like icons. On the one hand there’s advertising, and on the other the classic family photo, and I looked for images, of friends and others, of fathers with children. It’s been a long process, and at a certain point I even thought about painting on the photographs, but then I decided to stick with what I know and I chose not to use painting but only photography, but working more on colors. During this process I had the idea to look back at Godard’s use of color, in the early films but especially the last two, Adieu au langage (2014) and Le livre d’image (2018). I’d seen them in Paris, and I was really struck by the fact that the overexposure was almost a disintegration, and by the very intense color that Godard used in these last works, and the light. I thought that what I was looking for was something similar, although in the film there was movement and that was a different thing. Basically, it was important for me to pursue an intensity of color and overexposure, and I saw that it worked, because what came out of it were images that weren’t strictly tied to the context where they were shot. As often happened with my previous works, I found fragments that pertain to zones of contact where there’s an extreme closeness; there’s an attempt to capture something very strong regarding the early emotional relationship between father and baby – that very first relationship. There’s also something ambiguous and almost unsettling in some cases, in part generated by the use of that breaking up of color and the overexposure and the soft-focus. I was trying for an image that touches something deep within us, that’s something pre-conscious – as I wrote in my book Out of the corner of my eye: writings on photography, the photography that interests me is not so much the rational, analytical, descriptive kind, but the kind that alludes to a strong perceptive experience.

MM: But, unlike Godard, who utilizes images superimposing words that were incongruous with what is seen, you have an identifiable theme. In other words, you both use images that become blinding in a sense, almost impossible to look at – in the films, white might be followed by a red, that makes it seem even whiter, and in your photos, there are white parts that almost inhibit comprehension of what the image is. But in your case, there’s a subject that is absolutely not dystopian in itself, but in fact is highly meaningful, like the father-child relationship…

MBC: It’s a work on that area, that contact zone between father and child, specific to their bodies. It’s not just about the father, but about that less-defined thing constituted by their relationship.
The language I use and have used in the past consists partly of the unfocused blurriness which makes something unrecognizable, at least at first. There are several aspects to it: there’s the closeness, the fragment, the zone, the overexposure, the very intense color – over time and through trials, I got to something that satisfied me, something that pertains to the non-rational. The image is always something that goes beyond. Something that links to our preconscious. I think that all of these aspects together can give a good picture of that particular relationship that, before the advent of a “new” type of father, was typically the mother-child relationship. We might say that more recently it’s become the one that pertains to father and child. Something primitive, primordial.