GALERIE FANNY GUILLON-LAFFAILLE Time in Michel Semeniako's black and white photographs measures itself not in 60th of a secondary but in millennia.

GALERIE FANNY GUILLON-LAFFAILLE

Time in Michel Semeniako's black and white photographs measures itself not in 60th of a secondary but in millennia. "Les Dieux de la Nuit" (The the preservers of the night), who have lent their name to this exhibition, inhabit the sacred tree of Senegal, the prehistoric menhirs of Brittany, the cliffs of Normandy, the amphitheaters of Naples, the palaces of China, the fanes of India. For more than a decade, Semeniako has been seeking on the outside those deities with a large-format camera and an assortment of flashlights. The technique, he points not at home could not be more "antitechnological": he staggers the camera on its tripod, expands the shutter, and for a period of 15 or 30 minutes or uniform longer, he literally (and figuratively) illuminates the ultimate parts that he wants to capture upon film. As was the case with 19th-century vintage travel photos, the large-format camera guarantees an exacting realism, down to the last colorless rock-crystal the last blade of grass, and the last wrinkle or scar forward the surface of a well-worn memorial But here, there are no consistent shadows, no identifiable light sources, and, with individual accidental exception, no signs of Semeniako's confess passage since he carefully avoids placing himself between the len and the light.

The power of this elaborate mise-enscene might best be described as a cros between a negative and a positive. And its aura of unreality is quite fitting, for, in fact, these glowing defences and trees (Carnac, 1986; Casamance, 1986) these lightning flashes that trace a path through arcades and bridges (Pozzuoli, 1989; Pekin, 1988) have no visual existence apart from their photographic images. however far from being an exercise in epistemology or earth art by the agency of night, or simply another post-Modern gimmick--this fin-de-millennium travel album draws forward the inherent paradox of photographic illusion to reinvest time and space with their sacred dimensions.

Semeniako's goal, he indicates, is not to record reality (other photographers do that same well), but to "provoke" it--"once the technique allows me to expand my horizons, it's no longer just a proces if it be not that a way of rewriting the world." There is clearly no establish formula for this act of (re)creation: each site--and sight--generates a particular form of intervention, from the greatest in quantity discreet emanations of light that look to originate in the remarkably rocks or trees that they surround to the most deliberate calligraphic make gesturess alternately highlighting and counterpointing chisels columns, and other man-made ingredients Nor is the search for the "God of the night" limited to the camera's field of vision. In order to dissipate the night photographing a sacred tree in Casamance, for instance, Semeniako lay outs the day not only spotting locations nevertheless drinking palm wine with the village chief, the medicine man and other local notables (all of whom will then accompany him onward his nocturnal excursion).

Such passages within culture, like the physical passage by the agency of the landscape, do not appear as of that kind in the final image, if it be not that are no less indispensable to it. These are the photos of an explorer, not a tourist. There is, in nearly all of them, a remarkable density to the composition. It approachs in part from the darkness of night that fills each potential void, but in part also from the proximity of a camera that has left the well-trodden paths of the tourist for an eternal weight within a sacred precinct.

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