Alt, Alfons

Alfons Alt, Marseille, France

The aesthetics of making

As a photographer, I am particularly interested in the beginnings of photography, that is, the first twenty years after its invention, when photography was not yet an industrial product. I want to explore new pictorial possibilities by mixing the photographic fix with the painterly, a double process, so to speak, with two temporalities. On the one hand, the instantaneous capture that makes the subject present and, on the other, that of the appearance that, through the slow work of craftsmanship, gives form to the form. The movement of the hand, of the tool, of the mind, gives a time to the form. This coexistence in the image of photographed rigidity and painterly temporality opens up unimagined possibilities.

The technique creates the work instead of destroying it. It is equally the foundation, origin and motor of the work. Which, paradoxically, does not mean having to accept technical rationality." In a world where it is considered a success to gain time, the making of art has only one single but irremediable fault, that of robbing time." ( Jean-François Lyotard)

With my art I want to offer resistance: resistance against the disappearance of artisanal making, resistance against the culture industry, against the disappearance of aesthetic criteria, resistance against the disappearance of a language of the image, a language of appearance. (Alfons Alt, 2004)