Henry LEWIS / Radiographs

Radiograph 3 © 

Henry, what would define your photographic work best: would you say that you are a photographer of the body, of perception, or of the retina?

Well I might say that over time, all of these aspects have interested me and cannot really be removed from the whole. The bodywork was a beginning for me and in retrospect; the body, torso and face were used, as a support. So what I was hoping to deal with was the juxtaposition between the support and the paraphernalia it carried for the photo and finally the effect these two made on the viewer. Naturally this was as diverse as the audience. The element of performance is important; photography of performance-performance of photography. The body and especially the face have always captivated me and I dare say almost every human as it is basically the first thing that is viewed as a new born infant. Our attention is instinctively attracted to this large round shape incorporating two smaller round shapes for the eyes and one below, for the mouth. Not surprisingly the portrait has always been an omnipresent subject in art, at least in most civilisations. With the attraction people have for this form, the head or torso became very powerful tools for me.  Whatever is done with this subject matter can take on an importance and even alternatively when the subject is shown in a neutral or unadorned manner, the resulting photographs continue to convey their silent dialogue. “These Photo-Works are the results of ‘opening the sluice’, allowing a streaming of unconscious symbolisms from which the creative process draws inspiration and develops images and forms. This process cannot be clarified and must remain mysterious or of a dreamtime.”                                                                                                                                                        

The body was gradually abandoned in LVNA PROXIMA where the support was replaced by paper, drawings and miscellaneous materials etc., becoming depersonalised and less objectivised. Here the perception was mental, as opposed to physical. Later in another series called Circles, there is an association or interconnection between space and the physical body. The question is how this space is perceived by the mind’s eye. There is no longer a real subject, I am interested in whether the viewer is observing the photograph/photogram or is the work looking at the viewer. This notion seems to crop up often in some of my series, again recently in the series Burning. So in reality my work is not the photography of the body or the moon or the skies but what one becomes conscious of, when looking at these subjects in the prints.
 

Radiograph 4 © 

The radiologic work happened when Christian Caujolle introduced me to a medical student in radiology, Philippe Demange in Arles around 1985. At that time I was still finalising the body photographs and starting to work on other subjects. Philippe prompted me to do x-ray art photography. I was intrigued and met with him one evening in Paris and he smuggled me into the Salpêtrière hospital where we did a few trial images. We continued a few times at other hospitals but the chance of perfecting the technique seemed elusive, apart from the fact that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do artistically with that technique. A couple of years latter I met Professor Georges Salomon, a professor in neurology at the Hôpital de la Timone and a director of the friends of the museums of Marseille. At the time I had an exhibition called LVNA PROXIMA at the Centre de la Vieille Charité and somehow I managed to convince him to lend me an unused radiology laboratory in the national medical research facility (INSERM) with a fantastic old X-ray machine and darkroom. Kodak gave me a few thousand 25x30cm films so there really started my radiographic apprenticeship. I was also fortunate as to even have access to a technician who really helped me work out a great deal of necessary technique. As it turned out, the technique is not so distant from visual light photography but it took quite a while to grasp the rudiments. At the time I lived 100km away from Marseille and I would make a trip every week and work in the underground laboratory for the day. This lasted for a couple years and I was able to create a large number of radiographs. These were shown in various supports like the Light Frames in Marseille through a commission from the Fonds national d'art contemporain with Tom Drahos, Alain Fleisher and Pascal Kern at the Charité, but in Paris, Barcelona and further afield.

Radiograph 5 © 

I don’t really see cosmology within the technique of [my] radiography unless it might be fictional. Having covered the spatial aspects of my other work above we get to radiography. Here we are dealing with an invisible band of electromagnetic radiation, similar to visible light. However, unlike light, x-rays have higher energy and can pass through most objects, including the body. The whole procedure is set out in practice back to front to normal photography in that the subject is not viewed though a lens by the operator. X-rays are sent through the subject that absorbs this energy, more or less depending on their density and a trace is exposed on a sensitive film behind the subject. You might imagine this like a procedure comprising of these three parts: x-ray energy, the subject and the sensitive film. In photography we are viewing the flat trace of a three dimensional subject. In radiography, I am interested in the three dimensionality of the champ d’exploitation. The invisible world within this very narrow band, well described by Philippe Piguet in his text about our series Là et par Là. Here he draws a parallel to a universe described in Le Micromégas and also in his reference to “secrets microcosmiques de l’univers”. Naturally the nature of X-rays and then radiography are a door open to working within the aforementioned band of space and it would be of course an error not to concentrate on this. Therefore the playing field although physically small is extremely vast; the more you look the more there is to observe or at least to imagine you are observing.

Radiograph 6 © 

I don’t think of beauty as something you consciously research in an active way in making art. It’s a state of mind and might appear or not depending one ones introspective mindset. I think there are so many forms of beauty appearing in art, and what one person perceives as beautiful may be a horror for someone else, there are so many examples of this obvious circumstance. In fact some can develop over time, at first approach one might be chocked by a work of art and the element of beauty only then appears once the first stage of feelings has been absorbed or evaluated in your perception, for example, The Disasters of War by Goya or The Raft of the Medusa of Géricault. I personally think that beauty naturally has its place as well as ugliness or horribleness does and of course all the greys between. Maybe beauty would not exist if its opposite didn’t. In as much as light needs dark to exist.  

dernière modification de cet article : 2021