WHO ARE THEY ?

The twelve members of TendanceFloue - that had been celebrating its fifteenth anniversary throughout the year 2006 - are explorers of a new kind. They are free by electrons unleashed in a globalised world, they are blazing trails, whether alone / one relaying the other. They are in Palestine, but not to take war photos. They are at the World Trade Center in New York, but they only train their lenses on the many incredulous faces passing. They are at a rave party and take their photos like ravers, from inside the sensation. Their journeys to China are numberless, treading across the industrial wastelands of northern towns that are devastated by massunemployment and in which people wander the streets like zombies. When they reach the heartland of Mexico, it is to bring the Mexican Indians' struggle under the spotlight.

So where do these photos, that flirt the existential side of experience, stand from the viewpoint of the news and art ? What is it that makes the viewers so familiar with these photos on the level of shared experience, that they get caught up in the whole festive atmosphere and start to follow the collective's art shows like groupies going after Rock'n Roll ?

Magali Jauffret

THE EXHIBITION & THE BOOK

"Are We" is the last part of a trilogy that started in 1999. Each of those three book is an intimate and worldwide chronicle : photographs drawned from the lifelong archives of the collective, isolated and removed from their context interact and form a narrative.

More than 50 photos will be exhibited during the festival and will offer the visitors the possibility to Immerse themselve in this particular world and in the vision of the 12 photographers.

Are we?
An intimate and world-wide photographic account.
A show by the Tendance Floue collective

Tendance Floue celebrated its 15th birthday in 2006. The 12 photographers who make up the group share premises, points of view, time, money and bad moods.

"We make our way through the world's violence": when we all heard that phrase, 10 years ago, it seemed only natural to begin to combine our images and try to make sense of them. That gave birth to a first work in 1999, followed a bit later by "We aren't going to heaven anymore", a bitter and subjective acknowledgment, somewhere between documentary and fiction and imagined shortly after the events of 9/11 2001.

"Are we?" the last part of this trilogy, was shaped in continuity with the others, based on the principle of interrogating the world and the human condition.

We like books, exhibitions, projections, films and any other art forms that let us freely confront our ideas, our common and individual concerns. We look for meaning, without being sure of finding any. We attempt experiences, without being sure we will want to immortalise them. We look for a way of staying free, while leaving our readers, visitors and audiences also free.

You are here at an exhibition. You may have already paged through the book / seen a screening? Each time, the same title, the same story. Each based on the same material. Nevertheless, the exhibition does not mean to reproduce the book, and the book is not the catalogue of the exhibition. In the rhythm imposed by the sequence of pages, images follow one upon another like words to build a sentence, a narrative, an idea of the world. In the exhibition, use of space suggests a staging. Associations impose themselves like question marks. Contrasts are made.

Photo captions and the names of their authors are hidden, 'de-contextualised' by necessity. We consider this reasoning as an experiment. Doing away with the author and his individuality, ridding the image of its original caption, of its time, space and origin. In this fictional game of images, we thought it necessary to favour narrative and meaning, to the occasional detriment of 'documentary reality' / sacred copyright.

That is why in the 'dtories' authored by Tendance Floue there are sometimes deads that are not deads; that may just be ordinary people napping, Christs who are no such thing, but who, marked by our culture, appear to be so, cries of pain that are misleading bursts of laughter, unexpected objects and acts that may be read as symbols of our universal everyday life.

And so ? Are we photo-journalists, photographers, artists, smooth-talkers, crooks, apostles / neurotics?

Our profession has evolved considerably over the last few years: with new technologies, advertising budgets, profitability, efficiency, decision makers ... We are no longer necessary to the new information industry.

We are answerable to no one, neither to the press, nor to the "real world", that we continue to depict (or to deform?) in our documentaries. Disengaged despite of us, not without anguish but not without desire to tell the world, what is left to us is to persevere alone, with no limits to respect. Answerable to no one, all that remains for us is to enjoy the freedom that has been imposed on us.

Mat Jacob

Extract of the text by Jean Baudrillard in "Are we ?", 2006

There is, however, a kind of philosophy behind this "trend." Behind the "vague" there is the sense of the impossibility of precisely representing reality, the impossibility of accounting for its fluidity, ephemerality and imprecision. There is a sense of being and bearing witness to this impossibility and action taken to capture its movement and mode of appearance through anamorphosis and improvisation.

Jean Baudrillard