The studium is easy. A blonde woman stands in a red cut-out swimsuit and white sunglasses on a patch of sand, green flip-flops on her feet, one hip cocked, looking out. Beside her, a folding black chair. Behind her a dark wall carrying large graphic text in red and yellow — a fragment, ...AT, ...AVEZ DE 2, the number 43, a green arrow, an orange circle — and lower down, in a small blue box, the words Here!! A set, then: a beach that is not a beach, in a room with a painted wall.
What pricks me is that word, Here!!, with its two exclamation marks. Everything else in the frame is composed — the pose, the colour, the broken French, the arrow, the false sand. But that small blue label is typeset in a way nobody would choose for a fashion image; it belongs to the register of a shop sign, a tourist notice, an arrow pointing at a bargain. It has been included, and it insists, twice over, on a place that does not exist.
And so the whole picture tilts. I had been looking at a woman in a swimsuit; I am now looking at an advertisement for somewhere — an advertisement with no product, promising arrival at a location that is three metres of sand on a studio floor. The exclamation marks do what a photograph normally cannot: they are audible. Someone is shouting here from inside a fiction, and I find that I believe the shouting more than I believe the beach.
The studium is easy. A blonde woman stands in a red cut-out swimsuit and white sunglasses on a patch of sand, green flip-flops on her feet, one hip cocked, looking out. Beside her, a folding black chair. Behind her a dark wall carrying large graphic text in red and yellow — a fragment, ...AT, ...AVEZ DE 2, the number 43, a green arrow, an orange circle — and lower down, in a small blue box, the words Here!! A set, then: a beach that is not a beach, in a room with a painted wall.
What pricks me is that word, Here!!, with its two exclamation marks. Everything else in the frame is composed — the pose, the colour, the broken French, the arrow, the false sand. But that small blue label is typeset in a way nobody would choose for a fashion image; it belongs to the register of a shop sign, a tourist notice, an arrow pointing at a bargain. It has been included, and it insists, twice over, on a place that does not exist.
And so the whole picture tilts. I had been looking at a woman in a swimsuit; I am now looking at an advertisement for somewhere — an advertisement with no product, promising arrival at a location that is three metres of sand on a studio floor. The exclamation marks do what a photograph normally cannot: they are audible. Someone is shouting here from inside a fiction, and I find that I believe the shouting more than I believe the beach.