Bientot un evenement photographiable majeur...

[20x25]

... tout viens d'un de mes livres preferes, quasiment un "livre de vie"...
Je veux parler de "TOKYO-MONTANA EXPRESS" de Richard-Brautigan! Je vous conseille tous tres fortement ce chef-d'oeuvre qui me suis depuis plus d'une vingtaine d'années, sorte de petits poemes en prose modernes...

Quel rapport avec la photo me direz vous?

Un des textes raconte une histoire d'apres Noel, quand les cadavres decharnés et abandonnés des pauvres sapins hantent les trottoirs... et qu'un photographe entreprend de les fixer une derniere fois...

l'epoque approchant, nous pourrions lancer le mouvement...

@+

Christophe

[20x25]

A toutes fins utiles...

@+

Christophe

[20x25]

Super deçu par le manque de motivation sur une serie collective....

@+

Christophe

[Gilles]

Salut Christophe,

Je comprends ta déception qui doit être à la hauteur de l'enthousiasme sympathique qu'on te connaît (et qu'on apprécie).

Très honnêtement, si je n'ai pas personnellement répondu à ton appel, c'est tout simplement parce que... ben, j'ai rien compris (en tous cas lors des deux premières lectures ) C'est peut-être moi qui ne suis pas assez attentif, ou peut-être ton invitation était-elle un peu cryptique, ou peut-être un peu des deux

Quoiqu'il en soit, je résume, pour les lents du bulbe comme moi:
Christophe propose qu'on fasse une série collective de photos sur les sapins de Noël abandonnés dans les rues après les fêtes.

J'ai bon ? Désolé pour ceux qui avaient compris...

Au final, et maintenant que j'ai compris, je trouve que c'est une idée rigolote. Si l'occasion se présente à moi, je participerai volontiers, mais je serai à l'étranger pendant cette période (en Suisse, où l'on n'a pas trop l'habitude de laisser des détritus sur les trottoirs )

Amitiés

[20x25]

Oui, peut etre un peu obscur, mais tu as bien compris!!!:bienjoue:

Je vous conseille fortement la lecture (en francais ) de Tokyo-Montana Express

Le titre original de la nouvelle est "What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?"

Et pour travailler votre anglais, la voici en VO...

What are you going to do with 390 photographs of christmas trees?

I don’t know. But it seemed the thing to do in that first week in January 1964, and I got two other people to join me. One of them wants to remain anonymous, and that’s all right.
I think we were still in shock over President Kennedy’s assassination. Perhaps that had something to do with all those photographs of Christmas trees.
The Christmas of 1963 looked terrible, illuminated by all the flags in America hanging at half-mast week after week in December in a tunnel of mourning.
I was living by myself in a very strange apartment where I was taking care of an aviary for some people who were in Mexico. I fed the birds every day and changed bird water and had a little vacuum cleaner to tidy up the aviary when it was needed.
I ate dinner by myself on Christmas day. I had some hot dogs and beans and drank a bottle of rum with Coca-Cola. It was a lonesome Christmas and President Kennedy’s murder was almost like one of those birds that I had to feed every day.
The only reason I am mentioning this is to kind of set the psychological frame for 390 photographs of Christmas trees. A person does not get into this sort of thing without sufficient motivation.
Late one evening I was walking home from visiting some people on Nob Hill. We had sat around drinking cup after cup of coffee until our nerves had become lionesque.
I left around midnight and walked down a dark and silent street toward home, and I saw a Christmas tree abandoned next to a fire hydrant.
The tree had been stripped of its decorations and lay there sadly like a dead soldier after losing a battle. A week before it had been a kind of hero.
Then I saw another Christmas tree with a car half-parked on it. Somebody had left their tree in the street and the car had accidently run over it. The tree was certainly a long way from a child’s loving attention. Some of the branches were sticking up through the bumper.
It was that time of the year when people in San Francisco get rid of their Christmas trees by placing them in the streets or vacant lots or wherever they can get rid of them. It is the journey away from Christmas.
Those sad and abandoned Christmas trees really got on my conscience. They had provided what they could for that assassinated Christmas and now they were just being tossed out to lie there in the streets like bums.
I saw dozens of them as I walked home through the beginning of the new year. There are people who just chuck their Christmas trees right out the front door. A friend of mine tells a story about walking down the street on December 26th and having a Christmas tree go whistling right by his ear, and hearing a door slam. It could have killed him.
There are others who go about abandoning their Christmas trees with stealth and skill. That evening I almost saw somebody put a Christmas tree out, but not quite. They were invisible like the Scarlet Pimpernel. I could almost hear the Christmas tree being put out.
I went around the corner and there in the middle of the street lay a tree, but nobody was around. There are always people who do a thing with greatness, no matter what it is.
When I arrived home I went to the telephone and called up a friend of mine who is a photographer and accessible to the strange energies of the Twentieth Century. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. I had awakened him and his voice was a refugee from sleep.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Christmas trees,” I said.

“What?”

“Christmas trees.”

“Is that you, Richard?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“What about them?”

“Christmas is only skin deep,” I said. “Why don’t we take hundreds of pictures of Christmas trees that are abandoned in the streets? We’ll show the despair and abandonment of Christmas by the way people throw their trees out.”

“Might as well do that as anything else,” he said. “I’ll start tomorrow during my lunch hour.”

“I want you to photograph them just like dead soldiers,” I said. “Don’t touch or pose them. Just photograph them the way they fell.”

The next day he took photographs of Christmas trees during his lunch hour.
He worked at Macy’s then and went up on the slopes of Nob Hill and Chinatown and took pictures of Christmas trees there.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 14, 21, 28, 37, 52, 66.

I called him that evening.

“How did it go?”

“Wonderful,” he said.

The next day he took more photographs of Christmas trees during his lunch hour.

72, 85, 117, 128, 137.

I called him up that evening, too.

“How did it go?”

“Couldn’t be better,” he said. “I’ve almost got 150 of them”

“Keep up the good work,” I said.
I was busy lining up a car for the weekend, so that we would have mobility to take more Christmas tree photographs.
The person who drove us around the next day desires to remain anonymous. He is afraid that he would lose his job and face financial and social pressures if it got out that he worked with us that day.
The next morning we started out and we drove all over San Francisco taking photographs of abandoned Christmas trees. We faced the project with the zest of a trio of revolutionaries.

142, 159, 168, 175, 183.

We would be driving along and spot a Christmas tree lying perhaps in the front yard of somebody’s lovely house in Pacific Heights or beside an Italian grocery store in North Beach. We would suddenly stop and jump out and rush over to the Christmas tree and start taking pictures from every angle.
The simple people of San Francisco probably thought that we were all completely deranged: bizarre. We were traffic stoppers in the classic tradition.

199, 215, 227, 233, 245.

We met the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti out walking his dog on Potrero Hill. He saw us jump out of the car and immediately start taking pictures of a fallen Christmas tree lying on the sidewalk.

277, 278, 279, 280, 281.

As he walked by, he said, “Taking pictures of Christmas trees?”

“Sort of,” we said and all thinking paranoically: Does he know what we are doing? We wanted to keep it a big secret. We thought we really had something good going and it needed the right amount of discretion before it was completed.
So the day passed and our total of Christmas tree photographs crept over the 300 mark.

“Don’t you think we have enough now?” Bob said.

“No, just a few more,” I said.

317, 332, 345, 356, 370.

“Now?” Bob said.

We had driven all the way across San Francisco again and were on Telegraph Hill, climbing down a broken staircase to a vacant lot where somebody had tossed a Christmas tree over a cyclone fence. The tree had the same candor as Saint Sebastian, arrows and all.

“No, just a few more,” I said.

386, 387, 388, 389, 390.

“We must have enough now,” Bob said.

“I think so,” I said.

We were all very happy. That was the first week of 1964. It was a strange time in America.


Richard-Brautigan, 1968

peut etre l'essence-meme de la serie photographique...

allez, hop hop hop, fiche de lecture pour lundi!

@+

Christophe
PS: desolé, je n'ai pas trouvé de VF sur le net...

[loucky]

bah moi j'ai de l'avance



Ce spécimen a été trouvé étreint de son filet de transport, il était même encore porteur de toutes ses épines.
Photo prise au mois de décembre de l'an passé

[effraie]

avant d'être déçu, christophe, attend de voir si on fini par poster des images ou pas...
perso, tjrs avide de conseils de lecture, j'ai commandé ton bouquin... et si ça se trouve, ça va me motiver!

[20x25]

[benoit c]

avant d'être déçu, christophe, attend de voir si on fini par poster des images ou pas...
perso, tjrs avide de conseils de lecture, j'ai commandé ton bouquin... et si ça se trouve, ça va me motiver!

+1
sauf que ça attendra un passage en librairie.
Et pour les photos, l'occasion fera peut-être le larron...

[Jehan]

Faut avouer que le titre non plus est pas très explicite... je ne lis le fil qu'aujourd'hui.

En fait à force de voir des titres tapageurs dans les journeaux, j'ai appris à les ignorer instinctivement

Pas mauvaise idée, pourquoi pas...

[20x25]

Bon, simplifions les choses... on va dire que c'est un projet collectif (comment naissent les series?... ) et que peut etre on essayera de lui donner une suite dans la vrai vie (celle sans pixel ni electron...)
@+
Christophe

[rvlulu]

Passe pour l'pixel, mais sans électron, ça ne va pas l'faire...

Sinon, pour les réactions, j'encourage les polaroids de sapins de Noël par ailleurs... ça vient tout doucement.

[20x25]

Passe pour l'pixel, mais sans électron, ça ne va pas l'faire...

essayons d'etre positif...
@+
Christophe

[rvlulu]

Il est vrai que l'électron est à charge négative.

[P@dh]

Bon, ben moi je lis tout à la suite et c'est vrai que j'aurais peut-être pas tout compris du premier coup...mais grace à l'aide collective, j'ai eu toutes les explications à la suite .
Alors pour commencer, comme moi aussi j'aime lire et ne refuse jamais un conseil lecture, je viens de le commander (chez ******.**, tu sais Christophe !), et pour le travail collectif, je suis preneur aussi, mais il va faloir attendre que les sapins envahissent les rues je suppose...
Donc si tu propose une marche à suivre, ou un délai à respecter, je t'écoute...

P@dh.

[CYD]

Ca me dis.

[20x25]

Ca me dis.

Nan, Dimanche (de pelle à gateau...)
c'est rien, une attaque de bobbylapointite aigue!

@+

Christophe

PS: "Madame Mado m'a dit"

[20x25]

il va faloir attendre que les sapins envahissent les rues je suppose...
Donc si tu propose une marche à suivre, ou un délai à respecter, je t'écoute...

1) No stress
2) effectivement, les photos de sapins abandonnés dans la rue dans les semaines qui suivent Noel...
3) on cree un fil et on voit se qui se passe dans les mois a venir...
4) si c'est cool, avec des trucs sympa, on se met a deux ou trois (pas plus, sinon compliqué...) pour selectionner et mettre en forme la série collective... et on peut imaginer facilement une mise en page sous "Booksmart" et une publication chez Blurb (ou autre...)... pour ceux qui le souhaitent evidement et si l'ensemble tiens la route...

@+

Christophe

[CYD]

Ca me dis.

Nan, Dimanche (de pelle à gateau...)
c'est rien, une attaque de bobbylapointite aigue!

@+

Christophe

PS: "Madame Mado m'a dit"

M'en fous, je veux jouer de l'hélicon.

[monbon]

Bon, j'essaierai de participer, si je vois des sapins trainer bien sur !