PASSER PAR LE FEU

time is the fire in which we burn

Delmore Schwartz

When you go through fire, some things are burnt and some things remain. Youth goes through fire, it weakens it and reveals it. Time has passed through the fire: here it is burnt, irradiated. The blossoming, the full flowering, these images are those of a past season. Friendship, joy, experimentation, disguise, wandering, research. The photographs are the traces of a past and the persistence of a love. These photos were found in the junk of an artist's studio, at the bottom of a forgotten box. A first selection was made from this pile of colour slides. This selection was burnt in a fire. The plastic boxes and the frames of the slides melted, but the images survived, protected in the cardboard box licked by the flames. These images are the survivors of time and of this accident. They are also the persistence of a desire that gave birth to this book.

photographs by Sophie Fougy
editing and design Joseph Charroy
cover text from Gaston Bachelard's Psychoanalysis of Fire

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