• En début de matinée / In the early morning

  (Homme en costume près de la rivière du Thérain, Bailleul) / (Man in suit near the Thérain river, Bailleul).

  
• Vers 5h / Around 5pm

  (Enfant et chat au parc de l’Hôtel du Département, Beauvais) / (Child and Cat at park of the Department Hotel, Beauvais).

  
• Innocence

  (Homme tenant une enfant dans ses bras devant la cheminée de la briqueterie deWulf, Allonne) / (Man holding a child in his arms in front of the chimney of the brick factory of Wulf, Allonne).

  
• L'ange / The Angel

  (Femme ailée à la carrière de la Maison de la Pierre de Saint Maximin) / (Winged woman in the quarry of the Maison de la Pierre, Saint Maximin).

  
• Départs / Departures

  (Homme tenant une femme et une enfant dans le four à briques de la briqueterie deWulf, Allonne) / (Man holding a woman and a child in the kiln of the brick factory of Wulf, Allonne).

  
• Théorie / Theory

  (Femme devant le Moulin de la Mie au Roy, Beauvais) / (Woman at the Moulin de la Mie au Roy, Beauvais).

  
• La demande / Demand

  (Femme et enfant devant le Musée Départemental de l’Oise, Beauvais) / (Woman and Child at the County Museum of Oise, Beauvais).

  
• Elle / She

  (Homme au téléphone à l’étang de Bailleul sur Thérain) / (Man on the phone at the lake of Bailleul-sur-Thérain).

  
• Papillon / Butterfly

  (Enfant et papillon au bord d’un cours d’eau, Allonne) / (Child and butterfly by the side of a stream, Allonne).

  
• Temple

  (Femme ailée au Temple de la Philosophie du Parc Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ermenonville) / (Winged woman at Temple of Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau park, Ermenonville).

  
• 1-2-3

  (Femme et Homme avec des téléphones et enfant jouant, Allonne) / (Women and Man with phones and child playing, Allonne).

  
• Jet

  (Enfant et chat à la fontaine Saint-Michel, rue Carnot, Beauvais) / (Child and cat fountain Saint-Michel, rue Carnot, Beauvais).

  
• Noir / Black

  (Homme en costume pleurant devant le château d’eau du quartier Notre-Dame-du-Thil, Beauvais) / (Man in suit, weeping in front of water tower of the Notre-Dame-du-Thil district, Beauvais).

  
• En noyé / In drowned

  (Homme habillé dans l’étang de Bailleul-sur-Thérain) / (Man fully dressed in the lake of Bailleul-sur-Thérain).

  
• Le reflet / The reflection

  (Femme et enfant rue Jean Racine, devant les remparts romains, Beauvais) / (Woman and Child rue Jean Racine, before the Roman walls, Beauvais).

  
• Dans les arbres / In Trees

  (Homme ailé à l’étang de Bailleul-sur-Thérain) / (Winged man by the lake of Bailleul-sur-Thérain).

  

3D virtual reality can only be perceived when wearing red / cyan anaglyph glasses.

Set of 16 photographs.

A photographic order from the Conseil Général de l’Oise, France.

Publication Anaglyph Mireille Loup, Publisher Images Plurielles, 2016.

Sizes and process: 
Giclee printing process with Ultrachrome ink on Harman Baryta, Dibond mount on aluminum. Wooden painted frames H 28 X L 41 inches.

Limited edition of 5.

Price: € 3,900 incl. delivered with glasses. More information.

 

Wall paper print, H 55 X L 79 inches. Limited edition of 10.

Price: € 900 incl. delivered with glasses. More information.

 

Everything dies, even the faith in the images.

Our faith in technology is close to innocence. Twenty years ago, we were promised that through digital technology, our images, our texts, our memories would be protected forever. That they would never decay, that we would be rid of physical supports and associated disadvantages. We believed it.

In the 19th century, there was almost exactly the same kind of hope. We believed, among other things, that through photography we would be able to save for posterity the memory of that period. Yet we know very well that only two generations later, sometimes less, family photos of ancestors are not clearly identifiable. Who is this man in a suit sitting on that chair? what is the name of this great aunt with this lace dress?

Photography, as well as new technologies, has failed in its mission.

Now we know very well that the photos and other documents that we keep on our hard drives can be corrupted or may soon no longer be readable. Some will fall into oblivion just because of technological changes (disk, jaz drive, VHS, DVD ...).

The photographs of the 19th century are certainly better preserved than the Kodachrome photographs of the 60’s, but still we are confronted with the fact that nothing resists time (the fragility of glass plates, the paper acidity, the degradation of silver salts, the damage done by UV rays ...).

We must question the illusory notion that we can store memory. If we really want it to survive, it must be as an active memory, a “Random Access Memory", constantly reactivated, updated. World or family history must be told by parents to children, which themselves, will tell it again. Old photos need to be talked about within the family who owns them, or by historians who are the custodians. Knowledge needs to be transmitted from generation to generation. No hardware support or allegedly intangible media can replace the work of remembering.

Technology will not save us. It will not save us from death, or oblivion.

Birthing the World?

3D process has existed since the invention of photography. Long before films, Charles Wheatstone invented stereoscopy in 1838 and Ducos du Hauron developed the anaglyph process in 1891.

Despite dominant discourse, virtual reality is not new.

Most people have forgotten this and Mireille Loup reactivates this fact by reintroducing anaglyph photographic technique in contemporary work. Thus, she pays homage to the ancestors of photography and adds her contribution.

Mireille Loup was invited by the Conseil Général de l’Oise to reappropriate the stereoscopic pictures of Charles Commessy (1856-1941) that are kept in the departmental archives of the Oise County. She revisits the art of this photographer and this technology, with new resources. By voluntarily taking up this archaic, old, somewhat old fashioned anaglyph process, Mireille attemps to make us aware that a perfect double of the world can never be achieved.

Throughout history, art and associated techniques (trompe l’oeil, perspective, photography, film, holography, 3D, etc.) managed to convince us momentarily that they came closer to perfect illusion, to a faultless copy of the real world. The story of the Greek painter, Zeuxis, and of his painting of grapes that birds would have tried to peck, as they seemed so real, is just one (famous) example of that.

Furthermore each generation laughed at the preceding one that had been lured by such incomplete representations. Who today would run away seeing the Entrée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat by the Frères Lumières? Already, the new generations are no longer totally convinced by the 3D effects of the film Titanic, whereas it was only created in 1997.

It is always the same game, and it is a safe bet that there will never be a time when the perfect and final illusion will be created.

Photography has also embodied this utopia, this almost magical aspect of images, especially with its almost supernatural apparition in the developer bath. In her approach to anaglyph process, Mireille Loup makes us understand that, just as our ancestors, we remain fascinated by the magic of the image, this sleight of hand that makes a representation, suddenly, looks like reality. She creates the almost childish wonder at the apparition of perspective, a perspective that was not there, without red-cyan glasses, a moment earlier. She gives us, for a moment, the illusion of a possible, almost magical, transformation of the elements. Mireille also takes us into the world of childhood, of books where small cardboard theaters unfold and open.

Images haunt us

Mireille Loup returns there.

She has to return to the Oise County, in the same places where pictures were taken more than a century ago. So she returns there, with these technologies than her predecessors had used. She returns there, with the lights and the compositions that inhabit these old images.

Thus everything does not die. Even if memory fades all the time there are still residues.

In our personal memory remain residues of images, memories that are impossible to define exactly - which sometimes don't even belong to us - that actually came from a grandmother or a great-uncle, who told us a story that we appropriated in spite of ourselves. Psychoanalysis and psychogenealogy have sufficiently proved this. This residual memory provokes in us a sense of strangeness, a mysterious already lived, sensations which Mireille Loup plays and replays with in her photographs.

Using images of the 19th century, where visible individuals are hardly identifiable, she reconstructs a different story. She stages actors and models from the Oise County, and simulates the aesthetics of American fantastic films of the 50s and the first 3D movies. She takes us inside a ghostly universe where residual memory remains.

Mireille Loup does not legitimize the existence of the paranormal. However, present research (including those of the American mathematician Edward Wittensur) on String Theory, speaks of a curved world with eleven dimensions showing holes in space-time, cosmic bridges or temporal lapses. We also often hear of strange phenomena occurring in the same place, as if it had its own memory and allowed different moments in time to filter through. As children, we all believed that we held extraordinary, but not yet proven, powers, and that ghosts did exist. As adults, we have all witnessed these hazards that make sense during days when nothing goes right, as if fate was bent against us or, on the contrary, these fantastic days when light is always green when crossing the street? Who has not met someone and experienced this strange feeling of having known him/her for a long time?

When Mireille Loup returns to the scene of the County Museum, where the tower is once again surrounded by scaffolding as it was when it was photographed by Charles Commessy, a century earlier, time seems to beckon. Is it an uncanny oddity worthy of Freud? Is it, as explained by Carl G. Jung, a significant hazard, a phenomenon of synchronicity characterized by the significant coincidence between an objective physical phenomenon and a psychic phenomenon (without an obvious reason or causal mechanism)?

Time beckons and, here, the photographer reactivates dead memory.

Using the magic of virtual reality, the wonder of 3D images, without trying to make us accept the unbelievable or the supernatural, Mireille Loup invites us to think about this strange memory of places.

It was there. It is still a little there, close to us, more than we might think at first glance.

A text by Nicolas Mavrikakis

Translation: Janine Lajudie

Nicolas Mavrikakis is an art critic and curator in Canada. Since 1998, he has been writing for the newspaper Voir Montreal and for several Canadian magazines. He was a member of the editorial boards of ETC, Spirale and Espace sculpture. He teaches art history, French literature, and the history of film, dance, arts and communications. His favorite hobby is assassinating artists.

The exhibition was produced by the Conseil Général de l’Oise, France.

Models: Véronique Joly, Valérie Nataf, Cannelle Berthonier, Olivier Lallart, Melissa Léchevin, Louise Marchal, Dune and Minky.

Technical Assistants: Sebastian Hubner, Solene Texier.

Warm thanks to Véronique Palpacuer.