The simplicity of Pin Hole has allowed me to center my photographic research, since 1997, on mobility and durability. So, I work with a long exposure time and a vague restitution.

This archaic technique gives me the possibility to explore the natural unframed image in spite of time's variation which is not only linear, but also physical.

The exposure time creates a distance between me and the formal matter which is, nevertheless, the crucible where the image works out and releases its own vitality to the visual dynamic.

In this deliberate action to reconstruct what I see and perceive, the integrity of the object remains unique even if the way to capture the matter is special and varied.

Whatever the work that is done on abandoned factories or the urban infrastructure the orientation tends toward a cruder and more instinctive view.

Through the processes of restitution discovered with Nancy Wilson-Pajic and tested on my images, I had the possibility to guide this new plastic approach in a more direct and immediate direction. After that I treat the photographic experience as a game. The game addresses us directly. It is our first contact with reality. It allows us to build ourselves physically.

"What matters most of all, is to show that play is an experience: always creative, an experience situated in the space-time continuum, a fundamental form of life" page 71 - Winnicott - Play and Reality.

Play provides a freedom of creation.I situate myself in a given time of activity and in this way I enter into a rhythm which imposes a certain resistance. From this confrontation arises the concretisation. Between the freedom of play and the constraint of work begins a communication from which the tangible result is the image.

The matter becomes the pretext to create a singularity more and more dense.

On contact with different sedimentations of light and with the oxydation effect of time, the austerity of the matter transforms itself and contains at the same time something joyful: a deliverance of permanence which comes from an act of desire.

The scale of values is inversed. The perspective is different and a new space/time appears. Between the reality, sometimes abrupt, rude or indifferent, and the matter, somber, luminous or opaque is formed the ebb and flow of time and memory.

Photography fixes in a chosen time an image which will remain. It is no more the reflection of the living, nor it's shadow, but the authentic reality of an interiority which finds its echo in some form of existence.

This image arises from a personal instinct, surely determined by the senses and in harmony with a will to transcribe again the real.

The image overflows to the one who looks at it: goes out of the frame. It contains the mark of the shadow which gives it its skin, its flesh. Through the visual touch, I test this presence of the shadow. As Brassai emphasises in "Conversation with Picasso," "we have the eye but not the hand; we can no longer touch objects.." He insisted on this notion to prove to Picasso his submission to photography.

I would now like to realise a new approach with the polaroid. On one hand, through the presence of color, on the other hand, through its robotised development, the polaroid offers a continuity with this instinctive approach that I have experimented with since 1997. Some studies on the littoral, gardens, in the town of Lille: A reconstruction of these numeric images gave me the possibility to better understand places and subjects with the polaroid.

The color polaroid attracts and pleases me because it is not embellished. It is direct, simple, and without artifice. It complements my approach of the image and gives it the density which exists also with the pigmentary print.

Rémi Guerrin