Abstract(s) #66 Photography by Jean-Michel Ratron

Jean-Michel Ratron, photographer, by Eric Girard-Miclet.

Murs-Vivants, Waste in the Dark, Wax Nights, Vanités, Solitudes, the titles of Jean-Michel Ratron's photographic series already set the tone. For years in fact, during his city wanderings or his travels, he has scrutinized the sidelines of our environment (trash cans, the erosion of things and images, sometimes ruins), but also the beings abandoned to their destiny (migrants, homeless or more simply RER passengers). What emerges from these photos is an immense solitude, solitude marked by silence and anonymity, but without heaviness or superfluous pathos, let's say as an observation at the right distance, a modest testimony: “this is how we live today”.

And we live curled up on our artifacts, protecting ourselves from others in flesh and blood, like in this deserted fast-food restaurant, this man and this woman, each at their table, their eyes glued to their cell phones: digital propagation of our solitude...

Alone and surrounded by our ghosts. In Jean-Michel Ratron there is a certain attraction for human simulacra, which he hunts down at night, the realm of spirits. While, sculpted by the shadows of black and white, the livid profiles of the window mannequins seem to question us with their dead eyes, on the contrary, on the walls, tattered posters saturated with color exhibit noisy faces which move like demons. The night is double, enigmatic and feverish, like us.

During the day, wandering through public spaces, streets, parks, stations, metro corridors, the photographer zooms in on fragile moments of life, a hand placed on a banister, feet on a bench, sleeping faces, fragments of bodies in waiting for a visa or desire – it’s up to us to complete the scene. But it also allows us to see the world which imposes itself on us in its sadness and its brutality: there an out-of-service basketball backboard planted in the middle of the rubbish, elsewhere, against the backdrop of the setting sun, concrete columns armed topped with ridiculous steel wigs – post-modern Greek temple, toxic postcard.

But alongside what our eye sees, whether or not we choose to freeze, there is what the electronic eye captures, if we let it. In the series Voyage immobile, Jean-Michel Ratron lets go to let himself be invaded by the flows of light and the crowd, and lets the lens break into the heart of reality: traces of time, that tenth of a second that our eye could not guess, trails of colors, blurred, deformed bodies, as if in suspense, already ghosts haunting this urban, suffocating, almost prison universe. After our solitude, our disappearance, with the photo as our only memento.

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : 1959
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists