The Louis Roederer Foundation supports the carte blanche given to photographer Marguerite Bornhauser

Interview with Marguerite Bornhauser

© Marguerite Bornhauser – Rmn-Grand Palais

You received support from the Louis Roederer Foundation to photograph three years of renovations for the carte blanche Grand Palais exhibition. 

Yes, that support helped me develop the project with more ambition and work with analogue film and a photo lab throughout the three – soon to be four – years of the Grand Palais renovations. It has allowed me to take my work further and explore different avenues.

What immediately excited you about the carte blanche project at the Grand Palais? 

It’s rare to get complete free rein on a project of this scale. What excited me, of course, was the site itself, which hides so many secrets and stories, so many unexplored corners in such a great monument. The idea of being able to access and carefully observe the evolution of the Grand Palais in all its details, to explore it from end to end and appreciate its splendours as much as its neglected corners – to discover its layers and strata that tell the great and small stories of History.

It was also a chance to meet the people who work on the site, those who are laying the foundations of the building in basements or hanging from ropes above the void to restore the glass roofs. And the subject of the renovation work itself is fertile ground for creativity and a guarantee of perpetual renewal and transformation; the work is carried out over a long period of time without repetition or redundancy. I was so inspired by this project that I proposed three different series rather than one. Two photo series and one video series.

The first series is a purely photographic exploration of the work site. You get a sense of wandering and time passing, of changing seasons as well as years and layers of time – the points of view are either broad or focused on details and materials. I pay particular attention to details and sidelines. I like to bring out the banal, the trivial, and showcase objects on the building site that we would tend to leave aside. There’s a kind of poetry and sometimes humour in the scenes. Some of the images are dramatic, intensified by the brightness of the neon lights illuminating the construction site in the maze of basements. I wanted to present them in diptychs with the images connected with each other creating bold and colourful constructions that add a pictorial aspect to the project.

The second series seems much more abstract at first glance, yet it is based on concrete objects I collected on the site. As I wander through the Grand Palais, I collect objects I find on the ground or hidden here and there: bolts, padlocks, nondescript objects, signs, papers – relics of an evolving renovation project that I keep and sort by date and where I found them. I then isolate some of the objects found to produce photograms which, through their variations in colour and light, transport the object found on the site to a completely different dimension. A photogram is a silver halide photo made in a laboratory without a camera by placing objects on a photosensitive surface (photo paper or film) and then exposing them directly to light. I decided to work on the photogram in colour, which is more unusual (photograms are usually black and white), by making chromatic variations on each object and experimenting with various techniques for adding colour using filters or other methods. The images are therefore unique works of art made in the photo lab and they transport these objects to a multicoloured, abstract, bold and enigmatic universe.

As a photo artist, how do you find the freedom to work on a Carte Blanche project that also documents the evolution of a historic monument? 

The Grand Palais had already commissioned photographer Patrick Tourneboeuf to document the renovations in detail. So I was asked to propose an artistic rather than a documentary project on the site; I was lucky enough to be free of this constraint. But I did want to make my sensitive, quirky approach to documenting the monument’s renovations the main theme, which is why I decided to archive those little bits of the refurbishment work, the scraps, the bits that don’t usually make it into the story. It is another way of documenting. Instead of keeping track of what is prestigious and monumental, I wanted to record the little things that make up the day-to-day life of a building site, things that are more trivial and close to us and, in my opinion, just as important as something majestic. The poetry of everyday life.

Three years is a long time to be attached to a place and the people in the background. Do you see photographic capture as the appropriation of a place and a time or, on the contrary, as an extension of yourself?

I think that photography is often a balance between these two aspects, but I would say that the balance is much more on the side of the outside world: the pleasure of sharing, discovering, marvelling and learning. Photography is a tool that allows me to express a point of view, a message, sometimes to create fictions based on what surrounds me. But it is also and above all a pretext for reaching out to others, to other worlds that I would never have had access to. I work like a journalist. I ask questions. I learn. I like to be out of my comfort zone, my social circle and my town, sometimes even my country. Ideas always come from contact with others – and even if creating the art involves a great deal of solitary work in the studio or lab, the work does not exist without this shared experience.