… time, life … driving at night on a snow-covered road, listening to the silence of a room,  questioning oneself in front of a window – is that me? – walking in a corridor, all this almost as though in a film … A roaming life, with images here and there … Vision, is also noise, scent, dance, all senses  aroused, in search of some kind of grace? Colour is like black and white, that’s not what counts … what counts is the moment when a detail expresses a mood, a whole frame of mind … Taking photographs from a need to see, to show, but very simple, just photographs, nothing sensational! Larry Clark photographed his friends, getting high, in Tulsa. Luis Baylon in Madrid likes the people he photographs in the street; this goes far beyond documentary … Trundling along with no particular aim, Bill, Laurie, Juan, Roger, in this ethereal Mexico of the nineteen-sixties, so all the photographs were to be the same, without real aim, simply arising through the needs of the senses, of awareness … This “new life” that Véronique Kolber talks of in her notes … “moments lived”, “everyday life”, she calls it … With moments of cinematographic silence, when nothing happens on the film set. In “L’année dernière de Marienbad”, it is the long exposure times, so long, which give the photographic sensation of eternity, unlike photography’s so-called decisive instant.  Even though the technique is so fast – click, a thousand of a second, unbelievable! All this is not that decisive! This is what Véronique Kolber is telling us, that these moments are not decisive at all! She takes “objects, people” which are not there to make time stand still but rather to make it continue into infinity on the screen. Not a dynamic feat, just images, could it almost be said  “for no reason”? I wonder.

Echoes of emotion.

Moving without fear of spoiling the photograph, this being of no importance in the end  (whether it is spoiled or successful!) … Hesitating between adjusting close or distant objects, who knows? And … one even takes a photographic self-portrait, why not? It is an odd thing, photography, which make’s us believe that one can use it to stop time … Windows, show cases, curtains, rear-view mirrors, viewfinders, negatives, prints: screens projecting everyday life showing things we like or don’t like, try to understand. Playing the piano without knowing how, particularly without knowing how, just sounds that need to be made beautiful; writing. Véronique Kolber’s photographs wander through the sounds of the senses, roam through long days and long nights, on the alert and full surprises. It’s snowing, isn’t it wonderful with its beauty and silence? I would like to say “photography talks of moments which are apparently not important but which are, definitely very important”. These moments collect in the memory where they reappear on another day, the same somewhere else. The memories have to be absorbed beforehand. Photography is many things, an impressive social weapon (Lewis Hine), eternal documentary (Bill Brand’s London), a magic song (Weston), visual literature, and many others. In an area where television brings us life’s news, immediately and necessarily, other photographers at the same time give us poetry, which is also necessary, as a source of life. Véronique Kolber talks of that. Poetry lives and, every now and the, she shows us …

Text by Bernard Plossu

Published by Centre National de l’Audiovisuel (CNA), Dudelange - 2002
44 pages including photographs in colour
ISBN 2-919873-72-5

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