Revelation

From the earliest Mesopotamian accounts to the birth of philosophy with Thales, the aquatic element has symbolized primordial creation. A hidden realm, where light penetrates only with difficulty and where little-known forms of life dwell, the depths of water become a metaphor for the matrix, a place where gestation unfolds beyond the reach of sight. The photographer’s darkroom partakes of this condition. Paradoxically, the one who draws with light must do so in darkness. More radically still, any intrusion of light during the process of creation irreversibly destroys the image. Creation thus remains inseparable from mystery. The images presented in this series originate from autochromes dating from the years 1900–1920. These plates remained dormant for nearly a century in a trunk preserved within a religious institution in Jerusalem before being digitized as part of a cultural heritage preservation initiative dedicated to safeguarding, documenting, and reactivating historically significant visual materials through contemporary artistic and technological processes.
The digitized images are held in my private digital collection, comprising approximately 8,000 historical photographs on glass plates. Produced across three continents, this extensive visual corpus encompasses the Holy Land, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, North Africa including Algeria and Tunisia and European locations including England, Ireland and Italy. Taken together, the photographs constitute a visual record of the social, cultural and material life of the period, documenting education, agriculture, technological and medical practices, religious life, music and literature.
A photograph is a being privileged to be born twice. Two moments punctuate its existence. The first is the flash of light that impresses the photographic paper with the image carried by the negative. The second is the moment of revelation, which follows creation yet is not identical to it: the instant in which the image gradually becomes recognizable upon the paper.
Several temporalities converge within these works. The original autochromes required long exposure times, at times extending to several tens of minutes, before later being digitized using a digital camera. From these digitized images, new negatives were produced with an analog camera and printed through a gelatin silver process. The resulting prints were then photographed with a cellphone under conditions designed to reduce light exposure to a minimum. The monochromatic red that permeates the series is the red of the darkroom safety light.
Dr. Guillaume Tahar