Obsession Dietrich

ONE OBSESSION CAN HIDE ANOTHER

Pierre Passebon is an extraordinary collector, capable of gathering more than five hundred photographs of the unforgettable star of The Blue Angel and, at the same time, showing a keen interest in comics, the myth of Tarzan, and masculinity in Western iconography.

"I have irresistible visual desires," he confides. A passion bordering on obsession that leads him from acquiring images to producing them.

It was during a chance encounter with photographers Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout that the idea for a commission was born: to create a mise en abyme of his collection. To produce new images from Marlene's photographs, used as visual quotations.

Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout thus developed a new form of photomontage using their iPhones, based on the immediacy of Instagram and the ability to communicate images remotely. They mix, like a DJ would with music, the various photographs they send each other and react to in real time.

This four-fingered digital construction results in astonishing works. Marlene's faces succeed one another over time in a form of stunning stillness and permanence, while her legs multiply, creating through their proximity and juxtaposition a perfect stereotype. The same goes for her eyes, her smile, her gestures. Through these effects, comparable to Étienne-Jules Marey's chronophotography or the stroboscopy used by Harold Edgerton or Gjon Mili, Édouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout are part of a photographic tradition while renewing it. This modernity, born from a technological diversion that disrupts chronology, reveals an obsession: Marlene's concern with controlling her image and who, throughout her life, as shown in the works gathered here, knew how to take shelter under the mask of eternal beauty.

Jean-Luc Monterosso, 2021