Michel Gontran | blurry.memories

blurry.memories

Back in 2010, my father got a major head stroke and I backed up to Paris to support him. The emergency came quickly and he was fortunately saved. The next months he stayed at the hosital but still had troubles with remembrances. To refresh his memory, I used to show him my street pictures. My father enjoyed mostly better the blurry ones. It seems that the fuzziness of the shots helped him to reorganize his memory. Thus I decided to start a serie called "blurry memories".

What do the eyes catch in a fraction of second ? What is really printed in the memory ? Why do most of the people skip blurred pictures ? Unsharpness belongs fully to the photography, it is strongly linked to our way of memorizing. The blurriness carries a part of mystery and unknown like a fairy tale. Being a painter also, I wanted to explore the fluidity of the watercolors and oil mediums into photography. Most of the pictures of this project were inspired by dreams between abstraction and reality.To shoot blurrily gives a certain amount of wasted photos picked nonrandomly in our life. But amongst them there is definitely something to save, something which by its beauty, by its composition, by its geometry, by its timeless moments catches the awareness of a past and becomes a relay for the memory.

The movement that I add to the blurriness of time and space is like a trace of brush. It brings a grain of lightness and defies the gravity of the environment. All of this concurs to make the whole process highly subjective. "I" take the picture. Life and moments are running but I want to capture their chunks before they fade away too much. I want to oppose myself to the flow of time, at least for a fraction of second.

To take blurry photos is like to double, to multiply the remembrances, to face the time ; the unsharpness is not a lack of clarity : it is the visible and fragile sign of an act of resistance, strengthened by the beauty of painting gestures.

sales

Only three numbered prints are available for each picture in the format 80cm x 120cm, signed, framed.

Postcards are also on sales.

For more information, please contact me