Scott MacLeay: Paris Month of Photography 1982

Extract Translation

Extract from the “Mois de la Photo” Catalogue November 1982, Paris, France

“I am more interested in creating a ‘presence’ than I am in telling a story or producing actionoriented images. It is for this reason that the character of the movement (particularly in my B&W images) is restrained, often ambiguous, small, passive and apparently involuntary, as opposed to ample and actively charged with intention. It has a cyclical perspective, evoking abstract, perpetual movement. The result is a sort of immobility.”

Scott MacLeay, speaking of his exhibition ‘Fragments, Cycles, Sounds’ in the Month of Photography of the City of Paris.

Extract Translation

Art Press, November 1982, Paris France

“The colors employed have no particular relation to what is natural, with the truth one expects from photography. The color has a grain which is not that of the skin but that of light. Light melts the colors.

The spectator is solicited by a system of cyclical lighting. A musical cycle is superimposed, without synchronization, on the lighting cycle, thus creating chance combinations. The spectator’s habitual approach to the space will be broken down, but only at the risk of inconveniencing him and of providing him with another sensation of himself.”

Madeleine Dechamps, Art Historian, Article on the exhibition “Fragments, Cycles, Sounds”

Extract Translation

Critique from Litterature Art Spectacle, Feb/March 1983, Paris France “A room plunged in darkness, when out of nowhere, contemporary music.

A last person met. The music imposes a new structure to our heartbeat. We are ready, ready for what? The lights slowly increase in intensity and we S M L T our hearts, while our soul now departs totally from reality. For this is most O T room closes in on itself like a shell and only the music remains to disturb T reborn from the old. This new world is colour and harmony, but a blue is not a blue, a red does not appear red and a human does not appear T these perfectly harmonious immobile fragments possess. Here, there is no S gestures here before our eyes, immobile and nonetheless strange. Canadian S M L FRAGMENTS CYCLES SOUNDS T

Jean-Luc Signamarcheix, Art critic, from an article entitled « Winter under the Sign of the Image ».

Extract from an article on the Month of Photography in Paris 1982.