"I photograph to have an excuse to look. I photograph to capture what is otherwise inaccessible. I photograph because it causes less damage than firing a machine gun. I photograph to be able to forget. I would like my work to be like looking through a slightly open door, where the stories are not articulated or explained, but rather remain secret, leaving it up to the viewer to discern, discover, and imagine."
For each new subject he tackles, French photographer Jean-Christian Bourcart (1960) develops a style that blends, to varying degrees, investigation, experience, analysis, description, and formal invention. By using multiple mediums (photography, video, cinema, writing), he offers a kaleidoscopic vision that evokes, informs, and questions our human experience.
“How to sample the world, and to what end? How to proceed when the beauty with which it presents itself never fails to indicate its rawness?
In New York – and elsewhere, too – Jean-Christian Bourcart has compulsively gathered fragments of a reality that is, by definition, both shared and singular. Initially through an impulse, an encounter, an accident: like the lights of Broadway reflecting animatedly in a puddle of water; a pensive face blurred by the grime on a bus window on Canal Street, calling to mind a thousand others; festive gestures during a Gay Pride parade that unite a crowd in a trance, and so on. Gradually, a multitude of intentions take shape and feed into each other: they start to form a body of work, to initiate a narrative, a way of phrasing the world through images. The fragmentary ends up cementing a unity; in other words, seemingly disparate elements, assembled into albums or atlases, catalyze a gaze, however polymorphous, uncertain, doubtful, and anxious about what it sees, about what it can indeed see, and always wondering whether it conceals or reveals. Because, according to Jean-Christian Bourcart, 'life is a dream and images are the proof.'
— Guillaume Blanc-Marianne, art historian