The black diamond

Photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud (1952-1983) is a black diamond: rare, mysterious and precious, one of a kind. His life, like the work that emanates from it, is dense, but it remains partially impenetrable ; she is a dark heart that hardly allows light to penetrate. This is how Hélène Giannecchini, historian of photography at the BnF, offers it to us in the (perhaps true) image that she reveals throughout the pages: darkly luminous, multifaceted.

At the crossroads of the arts

There we discover a fertile and welcoming work which is first of all striking for its permeability, its intermediality. As Alix Cléo Roubaud writes in her diary, her work was born at the crossroads of the arts: “ Working like a painter, elements of rhythm, density, essentially photographic repetition. The singular to repeat up to the dance, up to the song. »

Let’s start with pictoriality. Born in 1952, daughter of a painter mother, the photographer practiced drawing and watercolor for a time, and reflects in her photographic practice the links that unite her with painting. Hence his references to abstract expressionism and his homages to colorfield painting by Morris Louis andaction painting by Jackson Pollock. Alix Cléo Roubaud works on her chemistry, mixing color with silver salts, or uses a luminous brush to draw on the sensitive paper – luminous brush whose writing of light also refers as much to the pictorial gesture as to the origin of photographic art, photogenic drawings by Henry Fox Talbot. The influences intertwine.

But, at Alix Cléo Roubaud, the image also maintains a privileged relationship with the written word. As Hélène Giannecchini shows, the repetitive work of Gertrude Stein, whose bilingual photographer translated the erotic poem, Belly Liftwith her husband, Jacques Roubaud, in 1980, constitutes a major influence. Just like the aphoristic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, which inspired him to write texts on photography and interested him to the point of beginning research for a thesis work that remained unfinished. It appears, however, that the text to which his images are forever linked is his diary, partially published in 1984, a year after his death.

Indeed, certain photographs appear alongside the pieces chosen by Jacques Roubaud, but Hélène Giannecchini notes that these remain subject to the text, simple illustrations, and that it is necessary to grant them an autonomous existence, to remove them from their anchoring exclusively intimate, to reveal their power, their photographic force. The fact remains that, if they are not subject to it, the works of Alix Cléo Roubaud cannot do without language and often transpose certain of its principles into photography. As evidenced by these superb prints on which the photographer has overprinted extracts from her writings.

And then there is cinema. The simultaneous or repetitive self-portraits, those which represent her in movement or in various progressive postures, summon the cinematic explorations of chronophotography by Étienne Jules Marey or Eadweard Muybridge who, at the end of the XIX^e century, announced the seventh art. The bodily gesture unfolds in the still image, leaving a blurred trail challenging the photographic stillness.

Furthermore, cinema is interested in Alix Cléo Roubaud: in 1980, Jean Eustache filmed Alix’s Photosa short film which represents the photographer conversing about her works. As the images pass by, we hear him expounding some of his theoretical and aesthetic principles. We see a living photograph there.

Vibrant with life

An image may be true shows a work at work, perpetually in research. Alix Cléo Roubaud has never stopped exploiting the plastic richness of her medium, when shooting or in the darkroom. We thus find ourselves confronted with a plural work which plays on superimpositions, multiple exposures or duplication, overexposure, turns and blurring. ; which takes shape through repetitive series, multiple self-portraits ; reveals the presence of the artist through shifts, the appearance of the negative strip and other covers. Through these multiple interventions – “ work with the negative “, she said in Alix’s photos –, the photographer creates a rich and original work that touches you with its paradoxically controlled spontaneity.

What does she photograph ? Above all, desiring bodies. Alix Cléo Roubaud works on the body, her body, the nude. His images are sensual, raw and sexual, erotic. She refuses and reverses the status of muse, asserts herself as “ avid photographer » (p. 93) which represents his lovemaking, his naked body ; a body involved in the image, both photographed and photographing. We are struck by the ease with which the photographer shows desire, the free body, immodesty and, sometimes, indecency. Nudity without artifice, natural and provocative. She offers us images of desire – fantasies, erotic reveries which are embodied in particular in this Kissso finely analyzed by Hélène Giannecchini –, a loving photograph marked with the seal of the life drive.

But the vividness of these images finds its counterpart in the morbid glory of the death drive, which manifests itself through its relationship to illness and self-destruction. Suffering from chronic asthma, Alix Cléo Roubaud drinks and smokes excessively, searches for her limits, looks death in the face. Thus she photographs herself simulating suicide, or, in If Something Black, lying down, naked and inert, simulating her death. She photographs Jean Eustache asleep, the body “ glorious » of the one who “ quietly feels that he is going to die » (p. 70). The images show his attempt to fix, through the representation of inanimate bodies, the disappearance of being, its dissolution in overexposed light. Thus, in the chambers of desire, death invites itself.

It seems to me that when reading this sensitive text, we discover a photograph “ auratic » (in the sense of Walter Benjamin), that is to say a photograph which has preserved the aura specific to the non-reproducible work of art. By her choice of a single print, Alix Cléo Roubaud refuses reproducibility (she destroyed the negative once the image was made, considering it a simple working tool). She is an original author, in the full sense of the term.

The magnificent pages that Hélène Giannecchini devotes to Fifteen minutes at night to the rhythm of breathingthis “ self-portrait through breath » (p. 119) carried out during an asthma attack, fully account for this. This striking moving landscape brings together the experience of the photographer (Alix Cléo Roubaud lying on the ground facing a cypress hedge) and her conceptual reflections. In its abstract capture of a duration disrupted by the hiccups of breathing (the dark and blurred trails of the trees), the image shows the intensity of the experience as much as it reflects on the status of photography, its indexicality and its temporality.

Dark heart

It is important to emphasize that, if Hélène Giannecchini brings the work of Alix Cléo Roubaud out of the shadows into which her death had plunged it, she also bears witness, with honest humility and a certain audacity, to her own journey, to his sometimes disconcerting confrontation with his object of research – a partly unknown life, a fragmentary work – and his unwavering desire to remain at the heart of his subject, to better embrace it ; to embrace it with its limits as much as its riches.

“ It’s me or it’s not me ! », says the photographer facing a vaporous self-portrait in Eustache’s film. The vague identity of Alix Cléo Roubaud is at the foundation of her work and the study of Hélène Giannecchini. This work of staging a plural and elusive self, which in certain aspects recalls the enterprises of Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman or Sophie Calle, becomes all the more problematic as documents, archives and information are missing. Hélène Giannecchini accepts a “ fragmented vision » (p. 15), composes with the partial, sometimes contradictory testimonies of the photographer’s intimates, draws on correspondence and accessible journals, but refuses a purely biographical analysis and is wary of suppositions and interpretations which would fill in the gaps. gaps.

“ I don’t want to speak for Alix Cléo Roubaud. I only know of her hopes and attachments what she wrote about them, I will not fantasize the rest. Fiction thwarts the scrupulous objectivity of the archive. »

Humbly, she sticks to the traces that survive and, through them, blends into her object of study, embraces its forms. “ Any writing that tells of a life bends before it » (p. 13), affirms the researcher. In fact, Hélène Giannecchini takes the path, the one dictated by the photographer’s work, to compose a fragmentary essay which brings about a vision, her own.

Coming out of the shadows, assuming one’s subjectivity in a “ I » always discreet, Hélène Giannecchini has the delicacy to assert herself while remaining in the background. “ Protected by the first person singular, I assert nothing ; I propose “, she emphasizes. His work, begun in 2008, resulted in a “ investigation without resolution » (p. 15) which makes the photographer’s work what it is: fascinating and unassignable.

Her free but restrained approach, sensitive but rigorous, soberly retraces the journey of the self-taught artist from 1966 until her death in 1983. Outlining Alix Cléo Roubaud’s path towards photography, which she decided to make her profession in 1980 , Hélène Giannecchini reports on TO DO of a little-known and extraordinary work.