Thomas Dhellemmes
At the age of 8, he took photos of the toys in his bedroom to stage stories and remember them. Since then, in his little notebooks filled with notes and thoughts that seem to race through his restless mind and sometimes even his words, Thomas Dhellemmes has never stopped compulsively pasting images. Manipulated, cut out, and assembled like a puzzle whose layout he keeps secret, they share the spotlight with all those he considers « ambiguous » — failed attempts, he says, but ones he is unable to part with. All of them have become his breadcrumb trail, a lifeline he cannot let go of.
In « Pierres Blanches », Thomas has compiled twenty years of snapshots taken in the solitude of walking. From Normandy to Japan, via the Île d’Yeu and the shores of the Mediterranean. Dhellemmes belongs to a generation for whom photography is a kind of missal, a necessary pause, a cardinal path. Not a means of finding one’s way back, but of finding it in the first place.
His journey begins where his roots lie and the landscapes he loves. Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing. The gray-green elephants of the North Sea sung about by a nostalgic Souchon on the shores of Malo Bray-Dunes. The carbon gray of the sky. The sad beauty of the landscapes. White houses in dark settings. The beach huts of the Opal Coast standing alone in their off-season solitude. You have to imagine him walking in the mist or under stormy skies, like Sisyphus pushing his camera case. Wandering silently on the island of Teshima, a remote corner of the Japanese archipelago, or on the jagged rocks of Bornholm, Denmark. Another time in Puglia or in the Landes. In Halong Bay or Mont-Saint-Michel, passing by the beach of Les Petites-Dalles in Normandy, so dear to Jeanloup Sieff, who inspired him greatly.
The photographs in Pierres Blanches were all taken using instant film, a technique Thomas Dhellemmes has been using since childhood. « Polaroid is as much a choice as it is a reaction. I like its violence, its harshness, and its pitfalls too he explains. » As with Cy Twombly, whose grainy lemons and sunsets on gelatin fascinate him, instant photography is a means to an end for Dhellemmes, not an end in itself. It is as much a method as it is a matrix. It is also a path to another medium after the shot has been taken: once his positive has been scanned, Dhellemmes recreates a negative, which takes him back to the darkroom. There, other instabilities revealed by the often approximate chemistry of Polaroid come to light.
Regarding the images in « Pierres Blanches » taken from the book published by Filigranes and exhibited at Polka this winter, Thomas Dhellemmes says: « Those were happy moments and I was alive. » These stones that sprout in his images and will outlive him are talismans. They are the secret and silent witnesses of a Little Thumb who never stops searching for his path.
