Divers

		John Berger's forword Léon Aymonier, chemist and photographer. TOWARD US There are many ways of reading this remarkable collection of photographs of the inhabitants of Le Châtelard-en-Bauges taken between 1892 and 1934. First and foremost it represents an historical document. For the people of the region in question this historical document may also be a personal one. We can only guess at the motives of the chemistphotographer, Aymonier, when, during those years, he so systematically insisted on taking photographs of everyone he knew or came to know, whether alive or on their death-beds. It seems to me that these motives were probably what we would now call ethnographic. Probably he wanted to establish a kind of typology of the inhabitants of the small town. Equally, it is possible to look at each single photograph in terms of the biography — even if very little is known of that biography of the photographed. At this moment the historical and the psychological come together. Furthermore even the first historical reading can be subdivided into information relating to local events, to the condition of the French peasantry at that period, to the economy of the region, to the distinction between social classes, to the mysterious relation existing between the photographer and the photographed. The discovery of this collection bas already provoked a certain body of research. This research is a contribution to local history, and one should remember here that, until recently, local rural history in France was a category of history that did not usually enter the history books. We are in the domaine of what was generally ignored. There are many dicoveries still to be made here and these discoveries can only be arrived at through patient and systematic research. To this valuable and necessary work I myself can unfortunately add nothing. I look at these photographs as a complete outsider. Yet, as such, I may be aware of what is intrinsically mysterious about them. I am writing these lines during the week of mardi gras. In our village in the Haute-Savoie this is the moment when some of the villagers — and not only the children amongst them — put on clothes which are not their habitual ones and wear masks. They go out into the village disguised. The village becomes a kind of theatre. And the actors, although familiar to everyone, are hard or even impossible to recognise. The effectiveness of this theatre probably depends upon two principles: that everyone knows the person behind the mask when urimasked: and that there is a rural law of hospitality that strangers, if there is no evident reason to suspect them, should be welcomed into the house. And so, the bands of the known/unknown make their tour of the village and are invited in to drink a glass, or be given eggs. All this to much laughter, joking and questioning. There is also, however, another, less obvious, dimension to this traditional theatre. The costumes worn are mostly old, they belong to the past. The masks are modern, but in their fixity there is something which resembles the spirit of the absent or dead. The theatre is partly a theatre of ghosts. The departed, the dead, the unknown, the forgotten, the half-remembered and the familiar make a reappearance. This reappearance is under the sign of Carnival; it is accompanied by laughter, ribaldry, exaggeration, caricature. It is as if, for a moment, the eternal is a joke, the joke eternal. I describe this now because these photographs, whilst also being concerned with the past, the dead in some ways familiar and in many ways unknown, possess a spirit and evoke an experience which are the exact opposite to those of Carnival. In Carnival the dead offer some of their liberation to the living. The two meet in the eternal joke. In these photographs there is no trace of any joke, liberation or celebration. Here the past re-appears as prisoner. What made the prison? Some of the answers are commonplace. The economic conditions of the region, the unidealisable harshness of peasant life, the profundity of peasant realism in face of necessity, the recognition of frustrations as inevitable. The fury and the passivity. There is another partial and less general answer: the prison of the situation in which most of the photographed had to submit to the demand of the powerful chemist that they should stand or sit there as specimens for his "objective" research into the human typology, of which he was the priviledged investigator. Yet when all the answers have been given, there is something mysterious which remains, and this mystery is closely associated with both prisoners and the dead. The mystery of the photographed's fierce interrogation of us, the readers of this book, who are net prisoners and who are still alive. Time and time again one finds in the expression of the face that is regarding us a common, almost identical, look. It may be the face of a boy still at the village school, the face of a veteran of two wars, the face of an old spinster, the face of a young woman, brazen, on the threshold of her life, the face of a local conqueror, or that of one born into defeat. How te explain the community of this piercing look? Of course a visiter to Le Châtelard during the epoch in question, on a particular day or evening — let us even suppose that it was mardi gras — would net have been aware of a quality shared by all the faces that he or she observed. This quality is to do with photographie distortion. It is to do with the character of the chemist, with the systematie and rather unskillful way in which. he took photographs, with his authoritarian relation to the photographed, with the reactions of the photographed to that mysterious machine which was going to seize their appearances and preserve them for the future, with the mystery of the instant artificially isolated and preserved. Yet if these photographs only told us something about the act of being photographed they would net haunt us in the way that they do. Something else is at work. We are looking at those who have disappeared. They have net come back te share their jokes with us at the moment of Carnival. At the moment, at which we are seeing them, they were not dead (apart from the deathbed images), they were not dead, and yet they already foresaw all. What they were foreseeing was the inevitable, yet in looking at inevitable they could net suppress the fury, no, the dogged obstinacy of their hopes. Hopes which were still intact, or abandoned hopes which. were still remembered. I do not know exactly what happened each time the chemist set up his sitters in front of the camera. I am tempted to say diabolic camera, for in the consistency of what his photographs show, there is something of the diabolic. Or, more accurately, something of the infernal. For all their banality, these photographs are reminiscent of the inferno. The condemned, whom Dante described, were avid for news of the world they had left, they still wanted to know what was happening now; unexpectedly it still concerned them. And se it is, even more directly, with these photographs. In these photographs of the living, now departed, now part of the past, like their clothes taken out at Carnival, we see the eyes of a furious hope directed towards the future where something other than what they have lived, exists at least as an idea. Today their look interrogates us because they, without ever imagining us as we are, directed their look towards our time. To call their hope utopian would be not only false, it would also make it too easy for us. These photographs impose upon us the duty of being haunted. Those who haunt, make one demand: a demand simple to define but hard to meet: the demand of recognition. John Berger.