Photographe | Yves Mandagot

The photographer can seize any object, at any time: the water flowing on the stones and pebbles carried out its inusable activity long before the photographer surprised her and she will continue to produce the same play of shadow and light when our eyes will no longer look at her. At a time when photographic activity often takes, in the public, the forms and attractions of "reportage," this borderless image of a modest (and yet inexhaustible) play of water affirms the freedom of the photographer to seize all that is visible, without aesthetic, sensitive or intellectual hierarchy. The sober reference to Monet's Water Lilies only reminds us that after a century and a half of hectic cohabitation, photographers and painters have stopped taking reality as the terrain of their clashes. Yves Mandagot loves painting and many of his images begin a lively conversation, sometimes ironic, with what our gaze owes to cubism, optical art to Mondrian's constructions or Klee's reveries.

The image of the water flowing endlessly over the pebbles is also a reminder of what photographic time is. It is that of Heraclitus and the materialists of Antiquity who warn us that we never bathe twice in the same river: reality is seen only in the space of the moment, in the disorder of the discontinuous.

Pierre Lepape / october 2019

A photo always shows something that is absent when you look at it; something that is both elusive and terribly sharp. This is quite precisely what is called a trace. The reality captured by the lens fades behind the photo; he has nothing to say, it is she who "speaks." Yves Mandagot only hopes that the fragment of reality he has framed will offer the gaze what the photo traces. Hence the feeling that he participates in things more than he reveals them.

His images do not provide dazzle. These images have nothing to say; they only show. Things long contemplated before the lens grasps them, but also ephemeral fragments torn from reality with a sudden and sharp gesture.

These images reveal nothing precious, they are foreign to any intellectual pose. If the places, the spaces, the objects that the lens has captured may seem banal to a hasty look, something in them, however, something trembling and uncertain moves, comes towards us, addresses us, captivates us, becomes master of our gaze. Our eye is witness to the appearance of a distant, however close it may be to what evokes it, to the updating of a secret lurking within even the most everyday of worlds.

Didier Alluard / july 2019

The structure of a photo, let's call it: its drawing, owes its precision, its sharpness to the thought that conceived it in the very moment when the lens seized it. It is in short the expressive form in which this idea was embodied through the play of the frame, chromatic values or light modulations.

The accuracy, the accuracy of a photo, is also that of the point where the camera is placed, such that the lightest movement would have inflected the whole space and affected the drawing of the image. If the camera is in direct contact with reality, the photographic act does not seek to reproduce reality, but to reveal a truth that could only be inscribed in the materiality of an image. As a general rule, which, starting from the real, is enough of a "pure look" very likely not to reach this truth; he submits to the world and accepts it as if he were not part of it. On the contrary, a photo of Yves Mandagot owes his drawing to the acceptance of a game with the world; it is a game of chance, but by chance tracked down, premeditated, a disposition to know how to grasp the accidental, but an accidental that the gaze anticipates and on which it always has a time in advance. Mastering this game is what makes it possible to hold in the frame of an image the tensions that run through it and to cut its facets as one cuts a precious stone.

Didier Alluard / july 2019

Do not let yourself be locked in places made to seduce the eye, do not look away either to see elsewhere, but step aside and grasp what stands in the margins of places erected as symbols of urbanity, that is also taking a stand, and it is above all a matter of good distance; a photo is just if it allows the things it has captured to be simply what they are, I would say: present, of a very material presence, opaque, and yet crossed by tensions that propel them to the front of our eyes.

The photo, if it wants to be just, has no vocation either to become the inquisitor of reality or to preach a blind faith in appearances. Its function is not to force reality to confess, any more than to put itself at the service of the incessant concealment of which it is guilty. Accuracy is the criterion for judging images in a world that has lost its innocence forever. It is also sometimes what one might call the "modesty" of a photographer, when he makes her his surest guarantor against a world he has learned to be wary of.

Didier Alluard / july 2019