I

Richard Foreman's work with his performers was rehearsed and stable over time but most of the other events I saw involved a great deal of improvisation, creating different effects from one day to the next. The transitory nature of those events that seem destined to oblivion was another compelling reason to record them.

The concepts I used at first for shooting photographs were modeled on my training as a filmmaker: the concept of coverage, gathering shots, collecting moments. None came from any preconceived ideas of what a good photograph should be about. Neither was I interested in capturing the singular photo that could be used to publicize the work. The photographs I accumulated, first of Richard Foreman’s theater and later of dance and performance art, were devoted to the concept of total coverage by shooting any new visual composition that occurred and discounting any possible interpretation of content. I was helped by the richness of this new tradition in Visual Theater that was the hallmark of Richard Foreman’s and Robert Wilson’s plays. Editorializing the multiple photographs would come later, I thought, and there might be no need for it. Furthermore, somebody else could do it.

Clearly in my mind, photography was not about passing judgement, on the contrary, it was about absolute objectivity. The justification for shooting the photographs was solely that they should exist. How the photographs could be used was left vague because they were made for others who would make sense of them, if not now then sometime in the future. Making that work visible for my contemporaries was not my primary impulse. On the contrary, I felt that the originality of the work would be understood only at a future date and perhaps my photographs would help in that discovery.

The photographs should not represent me, or my taste, but should be just about what I was looking at. I felt that selflessness was of great importance in recording photographs that later could stand as documents. I had an enormous respect for the value of archives.[1] Because of my film culture, I already was versed in the various ambiguities attached to the so-called objectivity of a photograph. The whole decade of the 1960s in film, especially in Paris, involved an examination of the fallacies of direct cinema and Cinéma vérité and writings, like that of Jean Rouch, which were familiar to me.[2] I knew how the presence of the photographer could distort what was looked at. In the case of theater and dance, in New York, in 1970 and 1971, what I saw was structured by the author-director, the choreographer, or the performance artist, so my presence as the photographer didn’t modify what I was looking at. It was not as if I was a filmmaker, as Chris Marker in Le Joli Mai (1963) or Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in Chronicle of a Summer (1960), filming real people going on with their lives. Objectivity, it seemed, was still a possible goal and it was important to justify the action of “documentation” rather than “interpretation”. The act of documentation was desirable because what I was seeing did not apply to an already known tradition but reflected structures that deployed new compositional rules. The comprehension of these new rules required objectivity.

I started to document spectacles that in those days were called “avant-garde”. I had a concept of avant-garde movements from the 1920s and of their historical importance in defining some of the present. But in France, my knowledge of the performing arts had been totally traditional. This is perhaps why I was so struck by the newness of what I discovered in New York on my first visit in October 1970. Using references to what we now call the “first avant-garde” from the 1920s was not so strange in New York in 1970. I therefore adapted to my needs the idea of using automatism like the surrealists had done forty years previously to relieve some of my hesitation about shooting photographs. It was only later that I learned that John Cage had brought to art making his concept of chance.[3] Chance decisions were made visible everywhere in the improvisation techniques of many theater and dance events since Fluxus and chance were still in the air when I arrived in New York in 1970. In my own practice I merged the two organizational concepts of automatism and chance.

Developing automatism in shooting photographs is not difficult. Essentially it relies on being very fast in setting up exposure, on focus and framing, and to dare to fail if you go too fast. You will get better at it over time, so speed is of the essence. My motto was: Shoot first and think later.[4] At first my strategies were all about trying to get a decent exposure in spite of the low light, and as many shots as possible in spite of the undistinguished background and unpredictable events that unfolded in front of me. There was hardly time to measure the lights for a good exposure, one often had to guess. But guessing right or wrong was not my primary concern as long as I got the shot. Getting it was better than missing it even if technically it wasn’t “a good photograph”.

The techniques of film emulsion and of film processing that I had learned, helped my ambition to become a cinematographer. The use of photography for scouting film locations was common practice at the time. And the search for an image that would not appear flat once projected on the movie theater screen was another preoccupation of the period. Both film director and cinematographer try to capture volume rather than flatness to bring a three dimensionality to the projected film image. Intuitively I felt that revealing volume was as important in photography as in film, so I privileged the use of normal lens over wide angle but kept my frame with a lot of context around the action.[5] The context, present in all my photographs, validates an objective look at what is there. More than just implying objectivity, the context guarantees it.

At the time I conceptualized photography as being solely literal and not metaphorical. I certainly believed that a photographer shouldn’t impose a specific “style” to what he or she was photographing. Without formal training as a photographer, I felt that a series of photographs was more telling than just one photo and valued photo in bulk rather than in single unit. The contact sheet was extremely important with its multiplicity of shots and its compactness in telling the story behind the event. To make a photo documentation that was as exhaustive as possible by showing all the successive phases of the event was more desirable to me than to shoot one great photo.[6] As we now know, those iconic photos can be misleading.[7]

Although committed to my own method, I knew that artistic practice has to be open ended and couldn’t be about applying rules that would fit all. On the contrary, art making is about inventing new forms. There was no feeling of constraint in regard to the rules I devised for myself. My own rules were somehow optional, as there was no need to justify any of my decisions. Although striving for objectivity in my documentation, I also valued my instinctive reactions in confronting the performance work. It is one of the most fundamental differences between my work as a photographer and my work as a filmmaker. While method and intuition are needed for shooting a film, for photography all you need is intuition. Furthermore, I believe that in shooting photographs, not only is an analytical response not needed, it is even a disadvantage.