Robin Maddock, photographe anglais né en 1972 est actuellement en résidence au Château de Saint-Martory. Peut-être l’avez-vous déjà croisé faisant feu de toutes les technologies, de l’IPhone jusqu’à une ancienne chambre photographique montée du trépied.
Artiste réaliste et chroniqueur de son temps à l’instar de Martin Parr, mais aussi poète saisissant le moment photographique dans un objet, un lieu ou un visage, Robin alterne entre vérité photographique et fiction à la recherche d’un instant magique, au moment où la magie disparait de notre société.
A la manière des premiers voyageurs de la Beat Generation il souhaite, à Saint-Martory, s’ouvrir à L’Univers. Dans une retraite qu’il s’est imposé, sans télévision ou réseaux sociaux, l’artiste prend le temps de parcourir la frontière entre le passé et le présent, qui est si visible à Saint-Martory. L’aboutissement de son travail sera un livre car c’est le support qu’il affectionne. Robin Maddock est un photographe éditeur.
Jean-François Delort
Décembre 2017
Robin Maddock sur sa résidence au château de Saint-Martory :
My work at St. Martory is a continuation of my interest in place and photographic truth and fiction within them. The particularities of time and place as specific, not grand ‘Humanity’ as a concept, but humans and their relics as the camera tells it, the here and now. What excites me in this part of France are the edges between what has been, history and what is happening in our hearts and minds now. France, c’est fini! vive la France…!
I use for the first time here a large format camera but want to continue my way into projects by experimenting with form and production, that means everything from found objects to Iphone snaps as well, working together; to be open to playing with received notions of authorship again.
The ‘beatific’ moment in the catholic tradition as reworked by the ‘Beats’ is about opening ones self to the universe. I’d like to think of my time here as a retreat from the world of noise with all that contains, my universe has become here for now. I have reduced it down to the real; of nature, a game of billiards, silent nights alone with the radio, a book for company, work, a bicycle and limited outside contact with my past.
If there’s one thing photography can offer us now; it’s the search for a sense of magic, at a time when it’s retreating from the world. This small town still surprises me in different ways everyday, in such great light here one can appreciate things one missed previously. Limitations encourage repeated intense scrutiny, as the great Frenchman Roland Barthes once said..
“Those who fail to re-read are obliged to read the same thing everywhere”
RPM
November 2017
