NZ Could you tell me when and why you first started taking photographs?
I began to take photographs ten years ago, but it was only an occasional activity. At the beginning it was just a distraction and a diversion – but a good one, and I became more and more enthusiastic about it, and it became a challenge to my writing. A diversion and a challenge at the same time.
NZ In what way was it a challenge to writing? What did you find you could do with photography that you maybe couldn’t do with writing?
What I write is without illustrations. I cannot illustrate what I write. There are no images to illustrate that. For me, image and text are very different and without connections. And so the process of dealing with images was a counterpoint to writing. It was the opposite of writing, and not at all an illustration of it.
NZ Did you find that your interests when using photography were a little different to your interests when using language? Did you have different thematics or a different set of concerns?
In some sense there is, maybe, something parallel in that with pictures I didn’t capture human beings or living things, but just objects and landscapes. It was connected with travelling and note-books and so on. It was another world, a second world for me, and maybe with my writing there are no human beings either. There are just concepts and abstractions – . . . but stories; there are stories in my writings, and maybe in my pictures there are stories too, but these are enigmatic stories. They’re not really folkloric stories. There’s a secret story behind every picture, but it must be deviné – it must be divined.
NZ What sort of secret story? Is it possible to say what sort of reality you associate with your photographs?
It’s not biographical. They’re not at all biographical. But objects are irradiating – even if they are banal, and maybe especially when they are banal – they are secretly irradiating from what disappears behind every object. That is what I was searching to capture if possible – what disappears. And what disappears behind every object maybe is myself – I don’t know. But it’s not my biography. It’s my absent biography!
NZ Have you discovered that as you’ve taken different photographs you are looking at different sorts of objects? Or are these objects all of the same category?
No. There were outer objects seen in foreign countries, travelling and so on, and also inner objects, from domestic environments – armchairs, desks and so on. There were two categories. But at the beginning I made no distinction between them. But as time went by I became more and more conscious that they represented two worlds which didn’t penetrate one another but which were in balance, one with the other.
NZ Retrospectively, do you think that the same two worlds exist in this kind of balance in your theories of the mass media? Is there an outer world there, and perhaps some sort of equivalent of an inner world, which don’t penetrate each other but which are somehow balanced together? Is there the same sort of balance of concerns in your writing?
Yes, I was always interested in the balance between the extreme outer banality of objects and their enigmaticity. I was always concerned not to integrate them, but to challenge one with another – the intimacy and the strangeness of objects or beings or situations or politics or media. The media are something very banal, very intimate and very domestic in everyday life. But they are at the same time something strange, and I’m searching for this strangeness of the media. It’s their only charm, since when we take the media as media they are very, very deluding, very, very deceiving. But we can take them as another strange world.
NZ So are you in a way the Paul Gauguin of the media, in the sense that you are looking for this strange quality within them?
Yes, yes. I’m concerned to have a vision of the media, not only as a consumption or as a commodity, nor exactly in terms of the society of the spectacle and of alienation, but as another thing which has – I don’t know exactly – maybe another interpretation, in addition to its usual one.
NZ Do you think that your critics have usually recognised these fairly subtle distinctions in your analysis of the media?
Not very much. My analysis was founded on McLuhan’s classic formula: ‘The medium is the message.’ But McLuhan’s work was never very widely received in France, and in this sense my analysis was not really taken up by those critics who hypothesise that people are manipulated through the media by the political classes and so on. I would argue the contrary. I would suggest that maybe the political classes and the world of politics are destabilised by the media – from the masses. On the other side of the screen are the masses, and maybe their influence is stronger than the adverse influence of politics on the masses. This is of course rather a contrary hypothesis!
NZ Do you think that your photographs in some way destabilise any particular point of view?
I don’t know. They perhaps partially destabilise photographic culture, in so far as it is founded on a history of academic photography with perfect technical sophistication – and that’s not at all my approach. My pictures are not thematic, they are not very sophisticated and technical photographs. This might account for a certain quality of singularity in my work – at least I hope so.
NZ What were your first impressions when you saw the exhibition of fifty of your photographs at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane? I believe this was one of the largest exhibitions of your work thus far. Was it something of a shock?
Yes. It was a great pleasure, and in a certain sense a shock, because it was the first time that I had seen so many. Twenty works were exhibited in Paris and about twenty in Venice. All at once I was conscious that there was something there – it was something new for me. On the one hand, I was disappointed because they seemed more aesthetic and more beautiful than I had believed them to be – and I didn’t really want this aesthetic quality. On the other hand I became conscious of building a new vision of my own strange world. I hadn’t been conscious of doing that, but I perceived a certain continuity in my work of the last three or four years. Before it was nothing, but over the last three or four years there’s a continuity maybe indicating something else – I don’t know – and then it becomes very interesting.
NZ Do you have any idea where your photographic work might go in the future?
No, not at all! I’m not an artist in the usual sense, and I’m not intending to do any particular kind of work. This doesn’t mean that I have no ambition, nor does it mean that I have a particular goal or an objective and so on. No, it was – and remains – for me a strange practice and is cultivated as such.
NZ If someone said, ‘You are a strange theorist,’ would that mean that there’s some connection between your strange theories and your strange photographs?
Yes, yes, exactly!
NZ Finally, what were your impressions visiting Australia again? Has Australia become stranger?
For me it was strange – and it remains strange even if it becomes more modern. For me it was so far away that it remains far away, like the moon’s surface. At the same time, I associate it with great depth of time and space – a depth of time and space that we don’t have in Europe, and especially not in France. So Australia keeps the same magic for me.
NZ Do you think that it’s the fate of the European to have to seek deep time and deep space overseas?
Maybe. We have time and depth in Europe, but it’s within history. Here it is not a question of history – it’s a deeper depth, it’s an anthropological or geological depth – and I’m fascinated by it. Because we in Europe have too much history – we have this sort of historical depth – we have enough and too much of it. But we don’t have this other sort of time depth – this more-than-anthropological depth – this beyondanthropological depth. And here it is more visible and more authentic.
NZ Does this mean that you may soon be writing a book called Deep Memories?
Yes – Deep Memories! That would be very good!
© Nicholas Zurbrugg. Original publication: ‘Strange world’, World Art: The Magazine of Contemporary Visual Arts, 2, 1994, pp. 78–80, 82.