Album(s)

Album #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8
photo albums
47.5 x 36.7 x 12.7 cm

Christophe Pichon’s various albums bring together a collection of images taken from amateur pornographic films. It is not the close-up or the sex scene that is depicted here, but rather what pornography leaves out—its off-screen space. Each album presents a range, a variation centered around a theme—the face, the functioning of the body, the woman subjected to the male gaze, the setting. The presentation of the albums plays on ambiguity. Each album is encased in its shipping crate, as if in a jewel box, which confers upon it the status of a precious object. But this aspect is contradicted by the simplicity of the materials: a plain shipping crate, photographs wrapped in plastic film, and the possibility of their manipulation. This suggests that the image itself has no value. 

In Christophe Pichon’s work, the act of photographing the television screen on which the film is playing—of cropping an already existing image—evokes the idea of doubly emphasizing a retinal image. The pornographic image is itself defined by a frame and what lies outside it. From fragments, the album reconstructs a mechanism. According to Larys Frogier, “the photographic act would then be a remarkable fetishistic act in that it fixes upon a full and silent presence (the fetish). But at the same time, it establishes, through exclusion or negation, a photographic off-screen space that would be the manifestation of a terrifying absence”1 (the absence of the phallus in women).

Alexandra Gillet