Errance

It sounds like an oxymoron, but I have “reread” one of my top favourite photo books: Raymond Depardon’s “Errance”. In Depardon’s case, reading a photo book is not at all strange. Errance is as much a literary and philosophical journey as it is a photo essay. It’s a very small booklet, with in fact more pages dedicated to text than to photos.

Depardon is an intriguing personality, exuding an image of high seriousness and timidity. Yet I don’t know any other photographer who is as forthcoming to share the intimate details of his craft and the life in which it is embedded. A first reading of Errance was slightly disconcerting to me because of its pervasive and explicit yearning for female love and companionship. It’s only Depardon’s disarming honesty which keep certain passages sliding into sentimentality.

What is more interesting, however, is both the actual subject matter – “errance”, meaning the act of wandering around – and the way this is translated into a photographic project. Depardon is very articulate about the thinking process behind his work in this book and it is immensely rewarding to be able to peek behind the curtains of a real master.

With “Errance” Depardon wanted to escape the drudgery of producing “information” or “documentation”, the raison d’être of his trade as photo journalist. Once he had taken up the plan to tackle a subject matter as ephemeral as “Errance”, the question immediately rose about how to render this photographically. And here is already a very interesting piece of advice: “I have to find what the Germans call an “Einstellung”: how to position oneself with respect to what one shows, and at what distance.”

Apparently, his Einstellung is determined via a number of photographic choices: “Starting from there, I chose a format, a focal length and a single camera. I was thinking about very sharp pictures, something very well defined in the graphical sense of the word, to avoid the caricature. I wanted pictures in a vertical format, cut in two by the horizon with too much sky, too much foreground in order to mark my presence and to avoid being able to cut corners. I wanted to provide a counterweight to the horizontal screen of the cinema, but also to the magazine spread and the grand romantic tableau.” So his quest for Einstellung begins with a hazily intuited sense of what kind of image he would like to produce and what kind of tools he needed to do so: an Alpa SW12 equipped with a 6x9 back and a Schneider 58mm Super Angulon. The 6x9 format reinforced the corridor-like effect Depardon was after. The rugged, precision-engineered Alpa would take care of the sharpness of images. The limited luminosity of the Super Angulon – largest opening is a f8 – forced Depardon to take pictures almost exclusively outdoors, in bright sunlight.

A second element in determining his Einstellung is, of course, the spatial datum of movement. Wandering around is essentially travelling. But it is travelling withouth a specific sense of purpose. It is very much the opposite of the “useful” travelling of the photo journalist. Echoing a text by Alexandre Laumonier, Depardon characterises “errance” as “the search for the acceptable place”, the place where at every point the question arises “what am I doing here?” (here I was reminded of Bruce Chatwin, another great wanderer). Depardon started out his voyage revisiting familiar places, such as New York and the African desert. But that didn’t work. There was too much history linked with these places. So he ventured elsewhere. The book doesn’t mention any particular place and there are no captions to accompany the pictures. But from looking at the images and from picking up clues in other Depardon books one can infer that he must have been as far afield as Patagonia, Berlin, Tokio, France, Turin, southern US, the Middle East … The wandering was aimless: “In Errance, there is no subject. I don’t defend the poor, I don’t decry the rich. I photograph clouds, the ground.”

A third and final element is Depardon’s relationship to the temporal dimension. In “Errance” Depardon wanted to get rid of the tyranny of the decisive moment and develop a more quotidian, more banal vision on the timing. “This is what I was after: the exceptional anti-moment”.

With these rules, Depardon had delineated his Einstellung, his base position. “I was very happy that I had given myself these strict rules to oblige with.” Within this framework, Depardon was now ready to let emerge whatever had to emerge in the purity of his gaze.

Reading through all this, I sensed a lot that was familiar. In the past couple of years I too have defined photographic projects at the intersection of a spatial (geographical) element and a photographic format. And I sympathise with the rigour of clearly pre-defining a strict set of boundary conditions – one format, one lens, one type of emulsion. What is, however, important is that in “Errance” Depardon shows that it is possible to combine this kind of rigour with Volans’ sense of “dancing in the dark”, of creating freely, openly and authentically. It’s not either/or: it’s and/and. One can work within strict boundaries without falling into the trap of a conceptual, mechanical template. It is not necessarily easy. Depardon is very well aware of the tension between “being open” and “improvise”

There is another reason why “Errance” so resonated with me. There is an obvious, direct link with the Hölderlin project. Hölderlin was an “errant” too, quite literally so. His journey from Bordeaux to Stuttgart is a prime example of a search of the “acceptable place”, particularly when we take into account D.E. Sattler’s findings about H’s drifting through Switzerland, forcing his way through the Adula Alps in search of a passage to his beloved Arcadia (the Greek Isles) only to return just when he caught sight of the southern side of the Alps. So the aesthetics of “Errance” as uncovered by Depardon are highly significant for the Hölderlin project as well.

We haven’t talked about Depardon’s pictures yet. They are truly gorgeous. To start with, the sharpness is astonishing. (Has Depardon taken all his pictures from a tripod? He doesn’t mention it). It reminds me of large format contact prints that I have seen in Hans Bol’s archives. There is a wealth of details near and far which simply draws you into the image. Similarly, textures have a luminosity and a liveliness that is typical for large negatives. Depardon’s booklet is very well printed. The images really shine. The reproductions are even better than the prints I have seen at the Depardon retrospective exhibition at the Rotterdam photo museum which lacked the inciseveness and liveliness of the photos in the book. Depardon has used an old Kodak emulsion – Verichrome Pan (not any longer available) – which results in a most deliciously delicate tonal scale. Even concrete and bitumen seem to live under the harshest sunlight. The few pictures taken in the soft light of early morning exhibit a delicacy and seductiveness that is a welcome relief from the otherwise uncompromising angularity and bareness of most images in “Errance”.

None of the pictures in Errance can really be linked to a particular locality. Billboards or mural inscriptions in arabic, french or japanese give the barest hint. Many images are taken in these nondescript in-between zones: the fringes of cities, suburbs, or on the road to nowhere. People are mostly absent (but their imprint is everywhere). If they are present, they can be seen only at a great distance (and if closer, only from the back).

What Depardon has mapped in his “Errance” are habitats, nothing more and nothing less. It is about places that are inhabited, sometimes barely so. One gets the impression of looking at our planet from a great distance: not the enchantingly poetic image of the great blue sphere swimming in space, but a place that is not particularly beautiful, not particularly loathsome. It is just a place. This is the purity of gaze that Depardon was after. It’s a perspective that is profoundly unsentimental, but deeply compassionate. I find this book, despite its diminutive size (and price), truly monumental.