Á Bruit

The artist book Á Bruit (With Noise) combines two works by french photopgraher Roselyne Titaud. Retour de chasse (Return from the Hunt) is a series of photographs made in November 2012 near the city of Görlitz in Germany. Images documenting a hunt, a hunt for images of animals that are peacefully stretched out, eviscerated, and could almost be sleeping. What fascinates in these images is the fact that there is no reproach in the hunt; there is instead, light and silence. There is something in this that goes very far back in time and that makes one feel the contemplative celebration of photography. It is no coincidence that the earliest known works of humanity are hunting scenes, as in the caves of Lascaux.

These photographs pay homage to the animals and inquire about the transition from life to death. To take a photograph is to clasp an event, a place, a person or an object onto a negative. This is a unique moment that brings the development of a negative back to all of its positive intensity. Photography is "to shoot a picture", to capture or fix a moment. Somehow, hunting is the most intriguing and liveliest metaphor of photography ... This is also why Roselyne Titaud decided to put the images of hunting in dialog with those of ponds and algae of her series Profondeur (Depth) that she took at the pond in Weinmeisterpark in Berlin. These are views of the beyond, perhaps, but so are the baths where the photographer develops the pictures.

When trying to make a timeless tribute to the art of hunting and the life of animals, she also thinks about the place of photography in the history of art. The Return from the Hunt is a topos of classical painting – from Rembrandt to Courbet – and poultry and game are one of the recurring themes of still lives. Though these works are never morbid: they question life, the transience of time – this is also called the vanity of human passions. They take us back to the fact that we, beyond all our passions, will one day rest peacefully as these deer on, or rather under, a bed of dead leaves.

This is why it seemed more appropriate to present this work first as a book rather than as an exhibition. The book is also always a grave, a burial that is opened in the middle, like the bodies of animals. A book where, in addition of the images, you will find a text by Damien Cadio, as a poetic mediation and dialogue in reverie with the images.

With a text by Damian Cadio.