Sophie Ristelhueber


 

"Scars across the face of the earth"
Guardian weekly, Great Britain, November 1, 1992

Over the last ten years the French photographer Sophie Ristelhueber has, in her own words, "revisited territories" (anything from landscapes and buildings to the human body) that have been "worn down" by man.
After focusing on battle-scarred Beirut a decade ago, she recently turned her attention to Kuwait, in the wake of Operation Desert Storm. The results of her investigations are currently on show at Le Magasin, in Grenoble's Centre National d'Art Contemporain.
It is difficult to classify Ristelhueber's startlingly original work. What it is definitely not is photojournalism, as she explains to Michel Guerrin in the following interview.

YOU photographed Beirut in 1982, and the deserts of Kuwait in 1991, six months after the Gulf War. Is your raw material topicality?
Whenever an event affects me specifically - for example Beirut following the Israeli invasion, the earthquake in Armenia in December 1988, or the war in Kuwait - I feel sad and sometimes angry at the way the images thrown up by such events are shaped. I experience it as a challenge that needs to be taken up. I went to Lebanon because I'd been struck by the backdrop of modern city ruins. I wanted to produce a hook full of silence ("Beyrouth Photographies," Editions Hazan, 1984) and simply document the city's ravaged buildings and pockmarked stone facades.
Other events are very important to me, such as what is going on in Yugoslavia. I went there last year but couldn't quite decide what I was supposed to be doing there.

In what way does your approach differ from that of reportage?
We've reached a saturation point when it comes to all images, and more particularly news images. The appalling realism of the pictures reporters bring back with them has ended up by becoming meaningless.
The presence of men can be evoked without them necessarily being present in the picture. The traces they leave behind are often more suggestive than actual images of them. Thus, in my Kuwait photographs for example, tanks are viewed from the air and look like exploded matchboxes: to my mind they evoke greater suffering than a picture of a soldier's shattered face.
Unlike photojournalists I don't seek to bear witness or to denounce. I don't put forward any truth. No one is breathing down my neck to see my work. When I got back from Kuwait, it took me over a month to look at and, so to speak, digest my photographs. They made me feel sick.

What precisely prompted you to go to Kuwait?
While the war was still on, I'd seen a magazine picture taken from a Jaguar aircraft which showed the black impacts of bombs that had exploded on the ground. I wanted to track down those traces, as well as those of the trenches and fortifications the Iraqis had made in the desert.
I was obsessed by time notion of a desert which had ceased to be a desert. And all the forms I had expected to see turned out to be in very much the same mould as the work I had done earlier on "cicatrised territories".

You combine aerial photographs with scenes on the ground. Why did you opt for such a combination?
By shifting from the air to the ground, I sought to destroy any notion of scale, as in Marcel Duchamp's "Elevage de Poussière." It's a picture which fascinates me, and which I kept in my head throughout the time I was working out there.
The constant shift between the infinitely big and the infinitely small may disorientate the spectator. But it's a good illustration of our relationship with the world: we have at our disposal modern techniques for seeing everything, apprehending everything, yet in fact we see nothing.
Although some pictures seem to have been taken through a microscope, I didn't want the play on effects of scale to become completely abstract either. So I tramped about a lot, photographing innumerable objects that had been abandoned in the desert - shoes, teapots, television sets, office furniture, and so on.
And then there was the "stuff" of war: shells, rocket-launchers, tanks and all sorts of mines. I found a collection of shaving brushes, razors, and little mirrors that must have formed part of the soldiers' kits.
There were personal diaries and tartan blankets like those of my childhood. I got the feeling I could physically sense the soldiers' crazed flight northwards. I was deeply disturbed by that twofold abandon of both man and object. Such "still lifes" highlight the prosaic side of warfare. At the same time, once divorced from their purpose, objects too become abstractions.

You are neither an artist nor a reporter, but a combination of the two. How do you come to terms with that contradiction?
Reality and collective emotion are an area which should not be left to reporters, editors and photographers alone. Ten years ago, my book on Beirut was criticised in photojournalist circles. It had to do with the fact that I was able to look at a house qua a house, that I could make it the sole subject of my work.
Studio work doesn't satisfy me. The essential thing, in my view, is to go and confront reality physically. In Kuwait, I wanted to become one with the territory, even though it was bristling with mines. It was also a way of formulating the problem of representation and, in the end, the problem of art.
Since the advent of the crisis, artistic milieux have begun to realise they must pick up the threads of reality again. It's almost subversive nowadays to say: "It's a very simple picture," or a "fact," like the portraits taken by Diane Arbus or Walker Evans, for example.

Michel Guerrin