Alexandra Catiere

Here, Beyond the Mists

Alexandra Catiere is creating in the world that has no boundaries. Her career, which started in the former Soviet Union and continued in the USA and France, is a story of striving for the universal and atemporal. With her camera Alexandra Catiere is capable not only of making an amazing representation of her characters’ emotions and experience, but also to register that very «atmosphere» pertaining to human nature as a whole. And the range of genres in her oeuvre is not limited to portraits or reports.

Here, Beyond the Mist is an exhibition that sums up Alexandra Catiere’s three months residence at the Niépce Museum in Chalon-sur-Saône (Burgundy). The young photographer had an opportunity to work under the supervision of François Cheval, the chief keeper of the Museum, and to use equipment from the Museum laboratory. During this period Alexandra communicated with local residents a lot. The stories of their lives and the autumn mist shrouding the city provided the material for her contemplation of time and space, the contemplation where everyone would inevitably find the echoes of his or her thoughts. Alexandra does not strive to strictly follow a certain topicality or method in her work, the world of her shots is full of contrasts, but some integrity and logic is surely present in it.

The static depiction is like a clock that stopped which we don’t touch as we don’t believe that it is necessary to restore the flow of time. So, photography is a trip from one clock of that kind to the other. On the one hand, the next clock forces out the previous one every time, and all of them appear for us simultaneously, on the other hand. To make photographs is to reproduce something that cannot stop, eliminating the absolute time with it. It is a mistake to view the process of making photographs as a sequence of events or a cause and effect sequence. Unlike more cumbersome forms of art, photography has all the features of articulate speech addressed to everybody without any exceptions, and comprehensible to everybody without any exceptions, the speech that does not offer any solutions though.

Any photographer is aware that he should not fully trust the idea stating that the achievement of maximum accuracy and truthfulness is the only mission of photography. To follow this theory makes one a slave of the locus and time. So, the decision he makes determines whether we would deal with an ordinary illustration, or with an image existing out of time. For photography is anachronistic in its nature: it goes on whispering even when everything has already been said, spilled out and exposed to public scrutiny.

François Cheval