Tiphaine Samoyault on Photography, Erasure, and Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil's 'Fin de représentation'

In a 2012 essay for artpress 2 issue 26, titled "MAC/VAL : Ce que l'art fait à la littérature," writer Tiphaine Samoyault explores her paradoxical relationship with photography. She describes the act of photographing as a form of war—selection, occupation, capture, and seizure—calling it "étreindre un noir" (embracing a blackness). Samoyault argues that photography involves privation: for the photographer, it interrupts time and rehearses mortality; for the subject, it denies disappearance by fixing them in an eternal image. She finds resonance in Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil's 2000 installation "Fin de représentation," which features family photographs with certain figures erased into black silhouettes. The work was inspired by a young West German woman who joined terrorist activities in the 1970s and removed all images of herself to avoid police identification. Samoyault sees this erasure as both general (death, disappearance) and intimate (confronting mortality). She confesses to never photographing her own child, a choice she finds scandalous to some, and recounts meeting a French woman in the US who moved abroad to escape being constantly photographed by her parents. Samoyault concludes that photography gives and takes away: it reveals a lack, calls for fiction, and opens an infinite space of unknown lives—a space akin to writing.