| Description |
From its beginning, Agnès Geoffray's work has been based on a reflection on the status of the photographic image, on the way in which images reach us (or do not reach us), on their fictional potential, on their powers conjunctions of truth and falsification. Her thought was built around the witness status granted to images, whether they are documents of historical value or vernacular images from archives. The image was and remains for her an articulation with all the representations associated with the idea of violence, victimization or control: in the images themselves are housed the ferments of a manipulation – manipulation of the image itself. -even, in what it is supposed to transmit, as well as manipulation of the viewer.
Agnès Geoffray is a photographer but a significant part of the iconography she uses is done without photography, by recovering archive images of which she is not the author, which feed a work of adjustment, editing, retouching and recontextualization. So there are images that sometimes come from his own shots; there are images that she finds and uses as is or with very subtle modifications; there are images arranged in cinematographic montages. There are also missing images, works without images – mainly made up of texts that replace the images. Her photographic work is also accompanied by films, montages of moving images, installations and objects. In a note of intent on her practice, she indicates: “In an iconographer's posture, I probe, elaborate and reactivate images. Through stagings, reappropriations or photographic or textual associations, I reveal a universe of tensions – latent and mysterious. Often developing from archival sources, my proposals result from a process of fictionalized reconstruction. Randomly gleaned from a book, the internet or various archives, I replay and reinvent the images that surround us daily, thus initiating infinite metamorphoses and inviting the viewer to reconsider their memory. In another note, she specifies the particular fields which constitute the main orientations of her research: the hidden, dissimulation, resistance, disappearance, revelation, the scopic drive, History and the archive, the hold . We intuitively understand the links that unite these different themes and it will be a question of identifying their precise meaning by approaching a few works.
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