Quentin Yvelin: On the Power of Analogue & Sequencing
Interviews
More about the artist:
Web: Quentin Yvelin
IG: @q_yvelin
Fb:
Quentin Yvelin (b. 1988, France) is a Brittany-based photographer and bookmaker. His work oscillates between graphic editing, subjective documentary and fiction while including other media, such as drawing and text. Yvelin primarily works with analogue photography to create his fanzines, books, and editions, highlighting the variety of photography’s development processes. Overall, he questions reality by exploring personal experiences and delves into “tangent spaces, imaginary lands and landscapes that infuse in a dreamlike and obvious strangeness.”
In an interview with Discarded Magazine, we talk about his latest projects and publications alongside his views on analogue photography.
Linda Zhengová:
You only use analogue; how does this technique facilitate your existential quest in your work?
Quentin Yvelin:
Analog photography is another matrix…it’s more poetic and artisanal in comparison to digital. I started photographing in this way – without immediacy and any guarantee of the result – and I started to like this latency and the surprises that the film induces. Through the incarnation and the material of the grain, the images appear to be more embodied. There is also perhaps a more fetishistic relationship to the photographic object.
Linda Zhengová:
Most of your photographs are black and white, there are only glimpses of colour in your oeuvre, why so?
Quentin Yvelin:
I started photography in the lab in black-and-white and then my aesthetics was formed by this filter, it established a relationship between me and the medium.
Everything became more dreamlike, escaping the real. I felt the sudden need to offer images whose temporality is not effective, identifiable.
Then I also started to photograph in colour. In the beginning, the colorized images that I made contained more textures in contrast to my regular landscape photographs and portraits. I used them to act as punctum – a form of disruption in the timelessness of some of my images. It is now a way of proceeding that comes up often in my books and/or series of photographs.
[…] the colorized images… I used them to act as punctum – a form of disruption in the timelessness of some of my images.
Linda Zhengová:
In some of your series, you sometimes use red colour as a form of disruption, what does this colour symbolize for you and what are you trying to achieve with it?
Quentin Yvelin:
“It hurts deep in our eyes.”
This sentence is taken from Julio Cortázar’s short story “Las babas del diablo” (The Sons of the Virgin) published in 1959, and which inspired Michelangelo Antonioni for his film “Blow-Up” (1966). This sentence brings me back to making my eyes bleed as we try to unravel certain mysteries, certain enigmas by photographing as if piercing a veil.
Sometimes, the red colour in my images is a reminder of this relentlessness to go beyond, to pierce something. It is a colour of obsession, of a desire that cannot be answered. In the end, I prefer when our eyes are bleeding…
[…] the red colour in my images is a reminder of this relentlessness to go beyond, to pierce something. It is a colour of obsession, of a desire that cannot be answered. In the end, I prefer when our eyes are bleeding…
Linda Zhengová:
Your projects are usually turned into photobooks. What does the process of making publications bring to you?
Quentin Yvelin:
The book or the editorial form is mostly at the base of all my projects.
Let’s say that I envision my work in narrative sequences. I like to offer a journey, a story through the assembly and succession of my images. The book is therefore the object par excellence which is full of possibilities. It is also another way of approaching photography. I have always preferred to apprehend images, to have photographs in an intimate and immersive relationship. The book opens and closes, you can decide to make your own journey, sometimes even come back to appropriate it “plastically” by adding annotations.
The book remains an “evolutionary” form, in mutation, it is much less fixed than an exhibition and the viewer grasp it, grab it with less restraint. There is also the “economic” question, it is a privileged means of circulating images, sensations, and ideas and of making them “accessible” and “visible”. I quite like this notion of movement, transmission, and appropriation. From a formal point of view, I quite like the use made of white space, the dynamics of emptiness and the relationship to texts; there is here a certain sense of purity and minimalism which gives a resonant force to the images and the “silence” between the pages leaves a lot of “possibilities”.
The book also makes it possible to replay things, to come back to them, to reinvent an image, to be in the repetition, in the recovery without being in the repetition. In this, the work of Robert Frank is fundamental with books like “the lines of my hand” or “flamingo”. Frank uses his photographs as matrices, associating them in new ways, intervening graphically on them, confronting them with texts. The book is a space that can combine photographs almost inexhaustibly. Frank has opened so many avenues, in particular with this “notion” of the subjective documentary, to put in image his experiences, his wanderings, his intimacy, his doubts… and in particular by abolishing the notions of photographic genres… documentary versus fiction.
Linda Zhengová:
Could you please tell our readers a bit about your latest photobooks?
Quentin Yvelin:
My last book: “The hut (from ashes to dust)” tries to talk about inner experiences that are related to the invisible, in particular through sweat lodges and the practice of fire as an element of transformation and passage to others or relation to matter and reality. I wanted to give this book a particular form that could recall the combustion, the ashes and the transformation/dissolution of the flesh. Risograph then allowed me to achieve this charcoal and ashy texture.
Over several years, I have gathered images and portraits of individuals that I have met in these ceremonies or during shared moments. I am looking for situations and people who are in search of a different relationship to the world that is less mechanical and less cerebral. A search for a more intuitive, sensory and spiritual contact with existence.
This initially results in disorientation that is certainly linked to the “tabula rasa”, to a normative way of life that must be abandoned. I like to talk about this “limit state”, this in-between, the moment when you abandon certain conditioning – societal and educational integrations… to really discover yourself through this introspective and initiatory aspect. That is something that I try to capture in my work and perhaps, as a result, it can have a little “occult” or even mystical side to it …
[…] I am looking for situations and people who are in search of a different relationship to the world that is less mechanical and less cerebral. A search for a more intuitive, sensory and spiritual contact with existence.
Linda Zhengová:
Would you say that your photographs should be observed in a sequence rather than individually?
Quentin Yvelin:
I often see my images in sets, kind of constellations…
I believe that I never finish rediscovering my images by associating them with each other. Sometimes I reuse an image in a new sequence to say something else.
Of course, some of my images are stronger than others. They stop something, they can also be sufficient on their own. And this is precisely the challenge of building a book well, leaving a space to breathe so that the images can say what they have to say. Some carry a meaning to several and others must do it alone.
I try to find a balance, to offer a narrative that is not too rigid or authoritative. The evocation of a story also draws on the quality, the plasticity of certain images. In my opinion, the two are in symbiosis. In the edit, there are often a few “fundamental” images that drive the story. Strong images which above all inspire me with their malleability.
[…] I believe that I never finish rediscovering my images by associating them with each other. Sometimes I reuse an image in a new sequence to say something else.
Linda Zhengová:
Now, you are working on a series titled ‘Mue’, what are your plans with this project?
Quentin Yvelin:
Yes, the series that I initially titled “MUE” started from a meeting with a young woman who was returning from India and cast a spell.
She wanted to do a purification ritual by shaving her head in a lake. I photographed this moment and from these images came new ones, I even took unpublished images from my archives so that they could take on a new dimension. The project is therefore expanding on what should only be a short testimony and slowly turns into a project that continues to grow. I think it will contain several chapters. The first will be released soon as a new edition.
My work is always putting into the forefront this relationship that we have with the invisible and the distortion of the real, an attempt to change our perception of the real.
It is an existential questioning, to reject certain conceptions and barriers to find oneself in a neutral space where I would like to bring out certain poetry. This poetry makes possible a link or a representation of what escapes us, fascinates us, and frightens us at the same time.
Currently, Yvelin is exhibiting at the Lendroit éditions gallery in Rennes, showcasing a series of unpublished photographs there alongside his latest books and fanzines. The exhibition is opening on September 16 from 11 AM to 7 PM and runs till October 30, 2021.