Floating Objects, 1980
Gelatin silver prints, 24" x 30"
"One obvious feature of a photograph is its capability to lift
a moment out of time. This, of course implies a measure of control
with regard to one's existence. You stop time long enough to dissect
it. It makes you feel as if you apprehended that moment. A frozen
record out of one's life experience. A record of being there. And
it's largely a misrepresentation: a visual record, removed from its
context, a reference to an event which precludes all but a split second
reflection of the occurrence. It's a fiction, like the way history
works. History as an embodiment, an after-the-fact creation wherein
disparate bits and pieces of information are compiled and interpreted
in terms of a contemporary point of view. The photograph, in its reference
to reality, works in such a way. But behind it is an intention and
the impulse to act. It is the individual shaping a meaning. It is
an expression and a response to an experience based on one's particular
circumstance."
Floating Objects Series takes up and extends the idea of using
photography to effect a visual archaeology of a site. Legrady took
the first photographs for this series while he was working on Catalogue
of Found Objects. Indeed, these two series can be seen as the systematic
and poetic sides of the same problematic.
In Catalogue of Found Objects, Legrady painstakingly organized
the objects in a way that made use of their forms, textures, and
colours to create a typology. Floating Objects Series, on the other
hand, constitutes a play of objects in which Legrady assigns one
of the main roles to chance. The operational parameters are simple;
the classic rule of three is respected. First, there is the location:
construction sites littered with miscellaneous materials. As sites
of unlimited possibilities, they are open to every action whose
aim is construction. Second, there is the time:
night, whose shadows erase topographic detail, hanging a black curtain
as a backdrop. Finally, there is the action: Legrady throws disparate
materials up into the air and uses a photographic flash to catch
them in flight. The expressionist painting produced by this action
abounds in objects that appear to defy the laws of gravity, in sharp
contrasts and perspectives distorted by the flash as it cuts through
shadows. This approach reveals how photography freezes time and
creates incongruous juxtapositions of objects reminiscent of the
"chance encounters" in the poetry of the Surrealists.
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Pierre Dessurault
Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography
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