Chantal STOMAN*

Another unforeseen effect of confinement. This parenthesis led many of us to take a step back to think about what was really worth in our lives, and the possibility of death – suddenly so intrusive in everyday life. The Photographer Chantal Stoman lost one of her aunts during this period. She went to the funeral in the old cemetery of Bagneux, in the Paris neighborhood. There, she noticed, as a woman of image, the very old ceramic medallions which adorned certain tombs. […] Photography, as Barthes reminded us in La chambre claire, is attached to death. She always says “it was » ( Ça a été ).

[…] All these faces, set in whitish, damaged, sometimes illegible medallions, all say, in their own way, “it was”. But their statement gradually fades away. The sun, the rain, the cold, the heat, the weather, but also the passage of time, dissolve these portraits. In a kind of slow “fading”, they vanish, by the same movement that they were once « revealed”.

[…] The death of the image redoubles death. So men cannot stay. Everything must return to nothingness.[…] Perhaps the photographer even confusedly rebelled against this second disappearance. Suddenly, it seemed imperative to him to slow down the work, or rather the “idleness”, of time, the way in which it destroys what once was. He had to work to preserve, to safeguard these faces in the intermediate state where they are still there, but barely perceptible like ectoplasm, a state witnessing the passage of time in matter. A time that “passes”, that is to say, crosses, accumulates in the material of the ceramic image and this is what must be shown. Thus it would be a work of curative conservation: a gesture that preserves, without repairing them, the material traces of time. […] Thus the loop would be closed for these beings, “revealed” by photography, then “erased” by time, and again taken up and celebrated on a ceramic plate, material of memory, to retain them here a little longer… This work, which is a reflection in action on the photographic image, also leads to a reverie on materials – chemical, organic, mineral – and on the know-how, that of the photographer but also that of the master ceramist. These are the two cemeteries of Bagneux and Pantin – another large and beautiful cemetery where there are many medallions – which will form the framework of this quest.

Thierry Grillet
Writer, Curator