Afterword of Nicolas Crispini, exhibit’s curator
-Why do you want to see them? I am not a photographer! You’re going to lose your time! It is with a mocking tone that the writer answered my request. We were workshop neighbours, at the top of a thirteen-storey tower in front of the Salève. I was a photographer but also lived off of iconography. Wanting to start off a common project, I had proposed to him to create together a four-eyed book on the edges of the world. He had accepted, though he admitted that the book had little chance to actually see the light, because he himself was reaching the “edge of his world”.
-Do you still want to see them, my images? He asked me the day after. He smiled and started to tell me stories, flipping through pages. I still have in mind one of his sayings: “There is another lesson from Asia that you bring back in your luggage, learning about death. In Asia, death is never hidden. It gives life its fair weight because solids have their shadows.”
It is while thinking about Nicolas that I stayed for three days straight in front of a wall in Nagasaki, photographing people’s theatrical shadows. A tribute to the poor images that he was waiting for, without impatience, on Arakicho”s “scene”. The writer praises the slowness in his art of travelling and being. In french language though, most of the synonyms of the word “slow” reveal the disdain of our society for this qualifier: unhurried, leisurely, lazy…Nietzsche, Kundera or David Le Breton also refuse speed’s apology.
This dive into Nicolas Bouvier’s work aims to be subjective and made fertile by his multiple talents. The pleasure of giving to see a collection of vintage prints which have never been exhibited. The one also of opening doors to other authors, a sign of his visual curiosity.
The first time I saw the pompeian red wall of his office, it was to ask Nicolas Bouvier a text, “The point of no return”, that I was aiming to use in the portfolio of my Kurdistan’s images. This text still lives with me.
“Life was so misleading and good,
That you told it or rather murmured to it
Go lose me wherever you please
Waves answered you You won’t come back from it”