Les 350 ans de l'Observatoire de Paris

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Observatorio Somnia

Thibault Jeanson

The work of Thibault Jeanson results from a long immersion in the Observatory to better highlight its essential elements. An ambience, a detail, a flash of light, characterize his pictures, dominated by feeling.

Chapter 1: the Arago dome.

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Observatorio Somnia

03 February 2017

“The installations at the Paris Observatory, at the heart of numerous visual, auditory and olfactory events, are always in a certain sense interactive, which forced me to reconsider my images from a photographic point of view: I forced myself to frame and search for a memento related to what was in front of the camera.

“Rather than to reproduce the visual, I have tried, and the paradox is hard to realize, to transcribe emotions, to include in the picture light and depth, a suspended moment  “beyond” time.

“To appreciate the various  elements of a place forces me in general to constantly go back, , to absorb myself in it, and to search for a sign on its walls; some kind of “timelessness.” A continuously passing instant of time.

“Just like the layers of earth created by successive landslides or gradual accumulation, my pictures try to represent an exact cross-section, a slice taken out of time.

“I try to go beyond the simply “beautiful” or documentary; in a certain sense, I am searching for the point where attention meets intention and where emotion dominates. Something of that “smile” that Roland Barthes seemed to search in the pictures of his dead mother.

“The Paris Observatory is a singular place, full of history and of… histories… Sometimes graven on its walls, but also quite simply by the trace of a body on a seat or the wear of an object, sometimes also by the muted sound of animals padding on the dome, by the swishing of the telescope in motion, by the smell of the century-old parquet… And, always pointing toward a distant object, looking at the almost ageless stars, the telescope suggests that we dream and think about the infinite.

I search for the moment when attention meets intention and where emotion dominates.