Lucien Hervé: A Photographer with Scissors
We are thankful to Ross Anderson, who identified these statements Lucien Hervé made when interviewed by Hans Ulrich Olbrist, and which are pertinent to this contact sheet in the Drawing Matter Collection:
‘When Le Corbusier received me in his office one day, we talked for a long time; I remember that he asked me many questions […]. We were still talking when we realised that time had passed, and he invited me to lunch. During lunch, he asked me, “But how did you become a photographer?” He thought I was a painter. “With a pair of scissors!” seemed to me to be the most appropriate answer.’
‘No, I wasn’t thinking about collage, a practice I love, but which had nothing to do with this case; I was thinking more about the freedom and scrupulous rigour in construction that had to be present in each of my images. You see, unlike many photographers at the time, I had no respect for film itself. For most of them, film is almost sacred, the image that remains printed is definitive. I thought, on the contrary, and not only because I was a young photographer, that one had to be free in everything, whether it was a painting, a drawing, a collage or a photograph. […] In an image, the relationship between shapes and tones constitutes a composition. Each image must achieve, through the use of scissors or other means, something constructed, and I would also add a certain purity. I use scissors simply because they help to achieve this result.’
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The two quotes are from Hans Ulrich Obrist, Lucien Hervé (Paris, Manuella éditions, 2011), 10–11, 15–16.
– Robin Evans