Where The City Pauses To Rest

Edge of Humanity Magazine

2 days ago

Photographer Pauline Rühl Saur is an Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘ASSISES / SEATS’. To see Pauline’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Seats. Public benches and chairs are so many still points punctuating the flow of the city’s bustle. These seats are found in various places such as parks, bus stops, subway platforms… but also along streets and boulevards. Outdoors, open to all winds, they are the site of exchanges specific to them. City dwellers whose home lies elsewhere set down there, for the space of a moment, their bodies, their belongings, their worries and their joys, sometimes blotting out the public space around them. They can choose to mingle with the surrounding world or refuse it, withdrawing into their own inner concerns. Public and private space are here closely brought together. People rest there, let their tired bodies go and close their eyes, exposing themselves in all their vulnerability. They wait there for a bus or a train, dream of some elsewhere or of someone they will soon join. They read, eat, make phone calls, contemplate, meet and talk to one another, grow bored and stretch… Whether mineral or vegetal, organic or metallic, these seats were designed with the intention that one settle upon them. They are a place of passage, inhabited discontinuously. Like their memory, fleetingly affected by this intermittence, the film records the trace of this slight disturbance. Only the seat remains. The frame of the photograph delimits the ground on which the act of “sitting” will play out. Just the movement of a body that stops, rests, and then moves on.

ARTIST STATEMENT

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and retrospectively. We write like Proust, to render things eternal and to persuade ourselves that they are. We write to transcend our life, to reach what lies beyond it. We write to learn to speak to others, to recount our journey through the labyrinth. We write to enlarge the world we find stifled, shrunken and desolate. We write as birds sing (…) Anaïs Nin, "On Being a Woman" Lecture, 1974

Film is my material of choice, for its sensual materiality, and for the calm it instills in me.

I like working with different cameras, particularly unpredictable ones that invite accident, that reveal the uncontrollable part of life, that open doors onto new worlds.

Unlike digital, I love the sharply distinct character of my film cameras: a fully manual Nikon FM2, a 1960 Rolleiflex, the Lomography Diana F+, a pinhole camera, and a Mamiya RZ.

One of the major notions I work with is time and memory on film (Reminiscences; The Spirits; Moults; Buried Landscapes, Seats). I am engaged in a quest that attempts to grasp it in all its complexity. Elusive, opaque, elastic, rough, blurred, painful, limpid, fast, excessive, nostalgic. The superimposition of seconds within a single image to counter the frustration of a present already past, to evoke the piling up of images within the winding paths of memory, the movement of breathing as an unfolding of the too-short duration of a fraction of a second. Bringing life in at all costs — the chaos, the disturbance, the uncertainties, the failures of memory, memories that fade, transform, disguise themselves, metamorphose, truths, always several, each person's own. The impossibility of certainties.

Alongside this work on visual matter, I continue my reflection on socio-economic and patriarchal domination; the institutional structural violence inflicted on citizens.

It is a body of work on the idea that the State and its institutions impose strict bodily norms and regulate individuals' living conditions through an economic system that profits from the exploitation of bodies and the marginalization of the most vulnerable.

There is a form of systemic control that affects both the physical aspects of individuals (bodies, behaviors) and their material living conditions (housing, food). This work is approached through my series: Mother's Body; One Day the Day; Aurélie's Injured Body; women's bodies constrained by their clothing, Suffering to Be Beautiful?; being a young girl in the age of social media, Clean Girls; life in my public housing project; and a spotlight on agro-industry with my Almost Dead Natures.

And finally, I have a daily photographic practice, a sensory rather than conceptual approach, a total availability of the gaze, which requires of me a kind of altered state of consciousness, with Flesh of Dust and Fragments.