In an interview on Swiss television, Jean-Luc Godard defines the image as the relationship between two distant things being brought together, or two close things being separated. “As thin as a hair, as wide as the dawn,” such is the image. The space between our mental representation of dawn and that of a wisp of hair offers our imagination and our thoughts a chasm to fill, a gigantic space into which images can settle. How then does memory make its selections, with its inventories and its erasures?
Camera
Marcelline Delbecq
Translated by Emmelene Landon
September 2019
Like when chalk makes a circle: as clear as that.
Jesse Ball
Marcelline Delbecq’s Camera stitches itself together from a constellation of inquiries into photography as a practice of intuition and enigma. Delbecq interlaces works of film, photography, and writing to open a dialogue with herself, investigating photography’s impulse to reach outward. Camera forges an interplay between movement—the kind that lingers behind visual objects—and stillness, implicating a theory of the image as an interpretative, embodied act. With the fixity and power that looking at photographs enables, Camera builds an awareness, like that of Chris Marker’s distinction between Russian and American filmmakers, that unravels notions of “as above, so below.”
About the Author
Marcelline Delbecq is a visual artist, writer and scholar based in Paris. After studying photography in the United States, Fine Arts and art theory in France, she progressively distanced herself from the practice of image-making to focus on the cinematic/photographic potential of writing through installations, recordings, live readings and publications. Recent work can be found in Trafic and P.O.L. She is currently enrolled in a practice-based Ph.D. at École Normale Supérieure and teaches creative writing in La Cambre, Brussels. Her book, Camera, is forthcoming from UDP in 2019.
Praise
Brushing against the limits of memory and knowledge in this marvelous meditation on photography and the machinery of observation, Delbecq invites us to contemplate the permutations on both sides of the lens.
Erica Baum
Like when chalk makes a circle: as clear as that.
Jesse Ball
A composite of earth and sky, Marcelline Delbecq’s Camera is a pocket-guide to places no one has been.
Alexander Nemerov, author of Summoning Pearl Harbor
A little gem of finesse and intelligence...
Marcel Cohen
About the Translator
Emmelene Landon is a painter, writer, video artist, and translator. She has exhibited her paintings throughout the world and in maritime museums. Her books include Around the World in a Container Ship, Susanne, The Blind Spot, Portrait(s) of George, Encounter Bay, and Marie-Galante, published by Gallimard. In addition to her translation of Marcelline Delbecq’s work, she has also translated texts on contemporary art and literature, including the platform www.switchonpaper.com.
Links
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-946433-28-2
Chapbook
Saddle-stitched. 32 pp, 5.5 x 7 in
Publication Date: September 01 2019
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)