Marc Riboud’s forms and compositions are intense and powerful, but one cannot consider them without what they represent, and so they encourage us to penetrate the opacity of reality.

The reality that such images at once reveal and conceal.

A reality upon which our questions and our answers are constructed and collapse, a reality that incessantly escapes us.

What I like in Marc Riboud’s photos is the room he makes for things that are not deliberate, for what is unintentionally accepted and that the lens notices. These strokes of luck that go beyond mere chance fascinate me, for they often carry within themselves what we do not as yet know how to see.

If there are photos that simply offer an account, these make of us much more than mere witnesses; in the questioning impulse that takes hold of us and remains with us as we stand before them, they give us the overwhelming feeling, at once tonic and painful, of being in the world, of being alive, of belonging to an unending whole.

 

Pierre Soulages