Christian Lebrat's Photographic Ribbons Rewrite Time and Space

Christian Lebrat transforms photographic accidents into a revolutionary art form: horizontal bands of overlapping images that capture up to four hours of time. Starting with a malfunctioning Kodak 120 film in a vintage 6x9 bellows camera, Lebrat discovered that overlapping exposures created a continuous ribbon of light, not separate frames. He adopted a Mamiya Press Universal medium-format camera with a manual film advance, always hand-held, to shoot these "action-shooting" ribbons. The resulting positive transparencies, 80 cm long, are viewed like stained glass. Early black-and-white works like those of Venice gave way to color in the mid-1980s. Lebrat's method involves no digital preview—only eye, brain, and hand. His 2009 ribbon "Haut Fourneau 3" achieved an unprecedented silver blue. He references experimental cinema (Jonas Mekas, Paul Sharits) and cubist photography, deconstructing architecture such as Frank Gehry's building at Bercy. Two ribbons homage Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," projected twice at Ciné 104 in Pantin, reversing the film's narrative flow. Lebrat's work is "augmented photography," exhausting a site's visual possibilities. Upcoming exhibitions include Galerie Eulenspiegel in Basel (Nov 28, 2013–Jan 4, 2014) and a publication "Le Temps déroulé/Time Unreeled" by Paris Expérimental for Paris Photo 2013. Born 1952, Lebrat lives and works in Paris.