STORIES TO SEE: RAPHAEL HELLE

It is today the French photographer Raphael Helle that is the subject of our chronicle Histoires de voir.

Learning to see is learning to photograph. Image after image, Stories of seeing you will discover, appreciate the "fabric" of a photograph. Understanding the notions of point of view, framing, composition ... reveal the formal strengths of an image and its techniques: density, color, contrast, light, depth of field ... This reading will provide you with insight into the meaning and aesthetics that The image carries within it and which make it its richness. Stories to see is also a journey, an adventure in the form of a chronicle through the photographers who count in the history of photography.

Laëtitia, assembly of the front and rear trains on the chassis of the cars, Factory PSA, Sochaux, June 2013

Descriptive Reading

The image is in color, horizontal, in the original 24 × 36 digital format. It represents an interior scene within an industrial universe: a long assembly line that fits in the ascending diagonal of the photograph - from left to right - bordered by a gray alley of waxed concrete. The multiple sources of light are zenithal. A main character, a young woman, is present in American plan at the center of the image. His body structures photography by its verticality and its axial position. It is positioned three-quarters face, oriented towards the left edge of the image. Her face and eyes are lifted and concentrated on the mounting device on which she works; She wears a bundle of black cables around her neck. One does not see his hands, hidden by the chain of work. It represents the only net element of the image. The depth of field is thus short, leaving the objects in the foreground, such as those forming the background in a progressive blur. She is dressed in a light gray T-shirt with short sleeves, decorated with a red and blue edging running from the arms to the neckline. This t-shirt features a black hoodie with long sleeves. She wears chestnut hair raised behind her head. Its fringe consists of short, crenellated locks dyed in a metallic blue color. She wears a double piercing at the birth of the nose, a second under the lower lip. Under the gaze of the young woman, in the first quarter of the image, the axis of a metallic piece adorned with a helical coil traverses and vertically structures the photograph.

A second character is present in counterpoint closing the perspective of the assembly line. It is standing, in foot and profile on the alley of waxed concrete. His arms are in action on the chain. He is a man of brown skin, dressed in a T-shirt and pants light gray. He wears a rasta cap with green, yellow, black and red colors. There is a third character in the center of the image, partially hidden by the main character. This industrial universe is dotted with areas and spots of blue, green, yellow and red colors

Analytical Reading

There is something hypnotic in the look and the presence of Laëtitia forming part of the assembly line of the PSA (Peugeot-Citroën) plants of Sochaux. This operative worker is in the center of the image, concentrating on her professional gesture as if he were summing up an eternal moment of intimacy and solitude at work. Indeed, the long perspective, which leads us to the bottom of the factory, without any escape, leads us to the isolation of work at the chain, the abyss of the repetitive gesture and the appropriate cadences. Until this quasi lunar illumination, this clean and metallic universe, constellated with rare bright colors that contrasts with the image of the working world of scarcely fifty years ago when the concern for decorum did not exist. A world gray, dull and not embellished in which the employees melted until disappearing. Today, Laëtitia carries piercings, sports blue strands and behind her, his colleague appears in Rasta. A way of existing, no doubt, of singling out, of resisting the roll of work and time ... A way also for this leading company to grant a minimum of individual freedom to retain a maximum of collective submission.

In his images, all his images, Raphael Helle makes no judgment. It gives to see. He leaves it to the others, to the viewers, to bring meaning to his photographs. It is never heetize, it is the industrial and commercial marketing that is today ahetistic, which scripts, disguises, which sweetens. Until the example of the language where one should no longer say "housekeeper" but "surface technician".

Raphael Helle is a child of the Aube. And more broadly from the Great East where he chose to live and work today. A child from these stricken regions, forgotten by the "spectacle society" which has become omnipresent, according to which the working-class world no longer exists and which it strives to make transparent or even invisible. Because this world of ordinary labor, workers, temporary workers and the unemployed, is not "sexy" as they say today. Luckily, there are photographers who choose to show life and not its artifacts; Like this photograph of a billboard hijacked in Montbéliard that did not fail to see the political eye of Raphael Helle: "Now when? ", Alluding to the famous slogan of François Hollande:" Change is now. " Poster made by the artist Pierre Fraenkel which must be named because it resists in its own way, in the long filiation of the Dadaists, the surrealists and, closer to us, the situationists. In 1997, Raphael Helle joined the Editing agency in Lyon and covered the victory of the National Front in Vitrolles. This is the click for photojournalism. He is interested in the world of adolescents, José Bové's international journey, street theater, and then in the field of ecology and global warming. From 2013 to 2015, as part of the project La France vue d'ici, he rediscovers regional realities, the Front National, and realizes his report In the Mouth of the Lion in industrial immersion in the PSA plant in Sochaux. In 2016, he returned to Bar-sur-Aube, the village of his youth for a collective project of photographers: Routes national. He discovers a catastrophic situation: closure of the Cristallerie Bayel, the Cauval and Allia companies, the Clairvaux prison, increased by a rural depopulation and faced with the rise of the National Front (36.76% in the regional elections in 2015 ). In the full critical and perilous electoral period we are experiencing today, the themes touched upon by Raphael Helle have a singular resonance and are at the center of all our anxieties.

As Laëtitia's photograph on the assembly line shows, Raphaël Helle places men and women at the center of her preoccupations, and as if by chance, very often, at the center of her framing. His images are dynamic, intuitive, carried by the flow of life. The space is open, the situation is relevant - the second characters are like second roles, decisive and complementary. But even more so, what emerges today, after returning 23 years later to the heart of his region, is his immense closeness to people, his curiosity for the other, his direct and true relationship, his fraternal complicity And deeply human that he makes us share - the other is always as a part of himself. Worn by its Leica M9 digital camera and its unique 35mm Summicron lens, it has acquired the means of its ambition to be in immediate contact with life. By this minimal choice of a discrete box and a single focal point, he acquired the essential, a millimeter distance; His camera becomes his body, his viewfinder becomes his eye. They me
Factory PSA Sochaux, February 2013

Demonstration of support for the employees of Cauval and Cristallerie Bayel in Bar-sur-Aube, March 2016