Loving hands: Selection #10

18 - 24 April 2021

Suspended in its motion, the hand is also the ultimate motif for the medium of snapshots. Arlene Gottfried is thus able to capture the silent language of tenderness and love, while Hervé Guibert reveals the simplicity of an intimate, routine gesture.  

  • ARLENE GOTTFRIED, I'VE BEEN LOVING YOU TOO LONG
    WESTBETH MUSIC FESTIVAL, NEW YORK CITY
    SEPTEMBER 21, 2008

     "When my mother heard I was singing with a gospel choir she called me the "singing photographer". Since then I have been singing with various choirs,  a chorus and eventually became a soloist."

    – Arlene Gottfried

  • L'ami

  • Les Douches la Galerie · L'ami, by Christine Guibert [in French)

  • "One day I saw two strikingly handsome young men enter. One of them was looking at the photos intently and making notes in a small notebook. His presence, though discreet, was strong. It was Hervé Guibert, as I learned when I read his article in Le Monde, which he had just joined. The boy who accompanied him and seemed to protect him was Thierry Jouno, who remained so present in his life, his books and his photos.

    With Hervé, we did not exchange any words, only a few reserved smiles. He was still very shy. Without knowing him, I felt that someone very important had entered my gallery, and my life."

    Agathe Gaillard, Mémoire sd’une galerie, Éditions Gallimard, 2013 (translated)

  • "The photograph of the missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with [the one] who has been photographed."

    Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 80-81

  • “A kiss! When all is said, what is a kiss? An oath of allegiance taken in closer proximity, a promise more precise, a seal on a confession, a rose-red dot upon the letter i in loving; a secret which elects the mouth for ear; an instant of eternity murmuring like a bee; balmy communion with a flavor of flowers; a fashion of inhaling each other's hearts, and of tasting, on the brink of the lips, each other's soul!”

    Edmont Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, 1897

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  • Les mains d'Elsa

    Give me your hands for the anxiety
    Give me your hands of which I've dreamt so much
    Of which I've dreamt so much in my loneliness
    Give me your hands so that I'm saved.

    When I take them at my own trap
    of palm and fear, of haste and emotion
    When I take them like a water of snow
    that melts from everywhere in my own hands

    Will you ever know what goes through me,
    What overwhelms me and what invades me
    Will you ever know what pierces me,
    What I betrayed when I flinched

    What the deep language says that way
    That mute way of speaking of animal senses
    Without mouth and without eyes, mirror without image
    That simmer of loving that has no words

    Will you ever know what the fingers think
    of a prey held a moment between them.
    Will you ever know what their silence,
    a flash, would have known of unknown

    Give me your hands for my heart to form there
    for the world to go quiet there at least a moment
    Give me your hands for my soul to sleep there
    For my soul to sleep there eternally.

     

    Louis Aragon, Le Fou d’Elsa, 1963

  • Care and repair

     

  • Agnès Varda, One minute for one image, 1982

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    or by phone: +33 1 78 94 03 00