REBOND

>>> REBOUND

2013

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pigment prints mounted on aluminum and ripped through with bullet holes

Diameters 40 and 48 cm

The photo-shooting gallery was once a very popular fun fair game, which my father played like many others of his generation. Based on the analogy between a camera and a gun (aiming, concentrating, shooting, triggering, reloading…), it consisted in shooting with a gun on a target and allowed the player to win his photograph. The impact of the bullet on the center of the target triggered a camera, thus allowing the shooter to get his portrait in the heat of the action, at the decisive moment of triggering. This game no longer exists in fun fairs, but it was brought up to date by the photography festival Les Rencontres d'Arles, and this is how I was able to repeat my father's gesture. Pushing the logic of equivalence between a camera and a shooting gun to the limit, our photographs reproduced on targets have been pierced by gunshots.

Beyond the symbolic gunfire exchanges between two generations, or the wider idea of replaying today something that was played in the past, these are two moments of a game's history that now face each other, a once popular practice that is now destined to a more educated public interested in photography. Similarly, family photos that once used to fill anyone's photo album are now no longer of interest, except for a few artists, collectors or photography aficionados, enthusiast, nostalgic, obsessed or hipsters, just like vernacular photography, now revalued by a new generation of vintage lovers.