ABSTRACT
Analyzing Mathieu Pernot's photography, one can see the ambiguity of the value of the photographic document within art. The simplicity in the frame, the brightness of the lighting, serialization, montage, and the impersonality of Pernot's images mark the endless contradiction between what is available by sight and what segments in looking. Pernot's work suggests a picture made by contact without refusing the identification between the symbolic representation and the index, the world's trace and the symptom of experience. The document becomes impossible in so far as it gives no access to the past such as it was, but the experience of time division as the power of the present.
keywords:
contemporary photography; art and archive; document and art
