When loading a film in a camera, the first shot always runs the risk of more or less fogging, it actually isn’t counted and bears the number zero, on the film. Some advance the film cap on lens, some take a picture casually, and others take the picture normally at the risk of losing a good photo because of fogging.

Jean-Christophe Bechet belongs to that last category and, while archiving is 2000^th film, browsing through his contact sheets, he realised a number of things. The pleasure of turning these pages, touching them; the way these thumbnails tell the story of years bygone, the difference between the pictures selected then and those he would select today; the singular poetry emerging of these half-fogged frames starting the films.

These #0 frames only have in common their being initial in the film. They weren’t shot for the purpose of this project. Their selection is almost arbitrary and, thus, are an almost objective vision of the real secret of the photographer: his negatives, the sequence of shots, their totality, successes, drafts, failures and accidents all together…

The exhibition is accompanied by not one, nor two, but three books. Taking the opportunity of the month of photography’s theme, the printed photograph, the author has teamed up with various professionals to create three printed interpretations of these #0 frames. It is the paper that changes, and with it, inks and processes. Pictures take on a different character on each and preferences vary. I guess that some years from now, like the author revisiting his contact sheets, the reader’s preferences may well evolve.

In the end, it is a great reportage on the journey a photographer takes in the mysterious lands of contact sheets, fields of paper, caves of printing until the fire of the exhibition!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 5.27 pm and is filed under expo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.