Work from the Collection

Reverse logic (In Camera)

Date of creation: 2014
Domain: Photographies
Medium: Photograph
Materials: Colour photograph on aluminium
Collection: Lafayette Anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin
Date of acquisition: 2015
Steven Pippin, Reverse logic (In Camera), Photographies, 2014, Collection Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin © DR
This work is the final stage of the artist’s experiment. Here, the weapon is placed inside the camera. With the help of a device consisting of two mirrors, the image is captured just as the bullet passes through the camera’s lens. The camera’s reflection can be made out on the left-hand side of the work. Steven Pippin’s 3 D Breach of 2 Dimensional space (In Camera), Deepfield, and Reverse logic (In Camera) are a form of artistic hara-kiri. In the photographic series Point Blank, he reveals the swan song of his shooting devices: the images are made at the very moment of the camera’s destruction by gunshot. Deepfield (2010) is his first attempt to shoot a bullet directly into the centre of the lens. In keeping with his work from the 1990s, Steven Pippin creates works whose result is not the fruit of a pre-established aesthetic construction, but the image of an image-making device. The elementary photographic technologies which he creates himself give his pictures the air of early snapshots, but there is nothing melancholic about his approach. Rather, it points to the proliferation of images and their means of production, as well as to the iconographic implosion that awaits us.

Exhibitions

Exposition Café Mater
Lafayette Anticipations - Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris (France)
from 20 Jun 2022 to 31 Dec 2023
Steven Pippin : aberration optique
Centre Pompidou, Paris (France)
from 14 Jun to 11 Sep 2017

À propos de l'artiste

Steven Pippin

Born in 1960 in Redhill, Royaume-Uni

Steven Pippin se plaît à créer ses propres chambres noires à partir d’objets inhabituels, qu’il s’agisse d’une baignoire, d’une machine à laver ou d’une penderie. Comme il accorde une importance égale à l’élaboration de ces dispositifs et au résultat photographique, il est tout autant sculpteur que photographe. Ses structures expérimentales de prise de vue reposent sur des modèles physiques et astronomiques qui le fascinent. La célèbre série Point Blank cristallise les nombreux questionnements de l’artiste sur la profusion contemporaine d’images : en élaborant des images photographiques témoignant de la destruction de l’appareil, il met en exergue le risque d’implosion iconographique que frôle la société.

Né en 1960 à Redhill (Royaume-Uni), Steven Pippin a suivi une formation en ingénierie mécanique avant d’étudier les beaux-arts au Loughborough College, puis la sculpture à Brighton Polytechnic et à la Chelsea School of Art. Il vit et travaille entre Londres et Berlin.