In one of his photographic series, the filmmaker, photographer and writer, Alain Fleischer (Paris, 1944) composes a play on reflections that multiply a portrait: he takes a Polaroid shot of a model, leaves the image to appear, and photographs the model again reflected in the frame of the first photograph. With this, he shows an expanded portrait: a portrait that captures time, working unnoticeably on the woman’s face, with a difference of just a few seconds. “Photography is no longer an instant captured from the real, it is the real in a fiction of time”.
This session proposes an approach to the portrait filmed by Fleischer, with two pieces that are reflected in each other: his self-portrait as photographer for the Contacts series and the essay portrait of the artist, Christian Boltanski, narrated in the first person by Fleischer. The first is an autobiographical journey through his discovery of Photography: from his first questions about the paths of the image and the word, to the increasingly sophisticated construction of objects, slides, fictions; from the first photograph of a nude woman (his sister) to his monumental erotic projections on urban architecture. The second, In Search of Christian B., is a tale told in the first person that tries to bring together some pieces that refer to his artist friend, who he had known more than twenty years earlier: images of recent or old films, images of places or installations, or images that simply remind him of him. “Sometimes, it is in the images that he is not present in which I have the feeling of finding him. And on the other hand, he does not seem to belong in others in which he is present, which coincides with our encounters”.
