A body is resurrected: Surfacing in a stream, the tiny skeleton of a bird drifts and turns before resubmerging into the water. In his video work, Ô gué ma mie Ô gué, photographer Laurent Millet captures spectral moments of death and rebirth, absence and presence, transparency and opacity. Living and working on the coast of southwestern France, Millet traces these conceptual threads through natural and built landscapes and objects to create haunting images of poetry and presence. He was awarded the 2014 Prix Nadar for his exhibition monograph, Les Enfantillages Pittoresques, and the 2015 Prix Niépce, awarded annually to a French photographer under 50 for their body of work. We spoke with Millet in December 2020 about his philosophy, practice, and living with ghosts.

A: It was at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature that I first discovered your work. I was so moved by Ô gué ma mie Ô gué—your film of the bones of a bird. How did this piece come to be?

LM: I was on the shore of a small river near where I was living then, about an hour south of La Rochelle.  The depth was very shallow—I could walk there. It was in summer, and I think I was barefoot. I was planning to record quite a long video take of something, and then I looked at my feet, and there was a dead bird in the water. It had been eaten by small organisms and small insects, or maybe the fish had been eating some—just the flesh, because the bones were there. It was right at the moment of decomposition when the tendons are still holding the bones together.

I wanted to get close because it was no bigger than a finger. I took it by the head and it didn’t fall apart—just one wing was missing. I put it back into the water and like a miracle, a tiny air bubble stuck in the skull. And this bubble made the skeleton float right at the surface—it started to float and follow the current. I started shooting because immediately I knew this thing was just pure, a dream, a miracle for an artist. I started to record the very smooth displacements of the bird in the water, trying to follow it.  

Every frame was bringing me memories of the pre-cinematographic fantasmagorias, of the magic lantern—when they were trying to frighten people with the spectral, with ghosts, with the presence of death. I realized that this simple animal was a very alive presence with many layers from the history of images—everything was concentrated in his presence. I saw that immediately, and this is why I was charmed, because usually to have this richness you have to prepare things, you have to build them. There it was just given. This bird was just simply magic. It was just a dancing presence in the water, like a victory over death and over decay. And there was no trick.

A: What is the meaning of the title?

LM: The idea for the name came from my friend Jean-Paul Fargier. He was one of the first video art critics at the Cahiers du Cinema in the 1980s, and he was very supportive of my work. He said, “You have to call that O gué.” It’s an old French word, but it can mean several things. The gué is the place where you can cross a river because the water is not deep. But “O gué” is also an interjection from the Middle Ages to say, “I am gay, I am happy.” It’s an interjection you say when you dance, or when you meet the person you love. In this case, to introduce the notion of dance was interesting, because of course this small bird is very linked with the death dance of the Middle Ages.

A: And the danse macabre also developed in response to the black death, to the pandemic of the 14th century, which makes Ô gué even more elegaic right now. Turning from past to present, you often talk about the creation of poetic worlds. In a 2014 interview with L’Oeil de la Photographie you shared the origin of that inclination in your childhood: “Starting with the first things I built, I felt like a world was opening up in which I could really exist, powered by my personal fictions, my dream of life.” How did that manifest and evolve in your work?

LM: When I start to work, I'm trying to live some things that I'm not able to live in everyday life, or make myself believe that I've been living these things or moments. I have a sort of prehistory from the moment I started to study and practice photography to the moment when I really found something. There was a period of 10 or 12 years, and then one day in 1997, I made the first picture of the Petite Machines on the French Mediterranean coast.

A: There’s a constant seeking—I think every artist is born with a world that they somehow need to manifest.

LM: I'm not sure I was born with it, because I have the desire for it. The world itself is really fed by the discoveries I'm making, by the desire of still trying to find an idea for a new series.

A: The first image I saw from Somnium, your series inspired by Kepler’s text, was of you with a constellation of tiny black star-like elements. It seemed like you were mapping a cosmos, but it was a depiction that felt very interior as well.

LM: It can be a cosmos, as you said, and it could also be a simple sculpture; it can also be a sort of brain map. The presence of this object in my small studio was very strong. And the making was fun. And the object itself was just very beautiful. It also looks like simulation objects that can be found in scientific labs, or could be found, because now any simulation is made with computers. I have a fascination with them. There are machines that recreate the movement of waves, the movement of sand. These machines are complex and there are always two aspects to them: there is the small reconstitution of a very fascinating natural movement of water or sand. And there is the rigid, metallic, precise organization of matter around it which creates the conditions to make the event appear. Both are precise, but one is man-made and the other one is sort of a record of—or equal of—the natural movement. I like that sort of relationship between the technique and the expression of the natural movement.

A: Yes — your process always informs the narrative of your work. For Somnium, you used ambrotype; how did that technique enrich and reflect the meaning of the series?

LM: To me, it's such an important element of the materialization of the image, it’s the body of the image. It’s very intriguing because it's not black glass, the black is behind the plate—it's painted or it's varnish. This is why I said that the black is a transparency, because you have to look through the plate to get the black. The white is a reflection, because the silver oxide is made very brilliant by the chemicals—the light is reflected by the very shiny, glossy aspect of the silver.

So you have in hand something that has to be looked at both like a print and a slide. This is quite strange. And when I make a plate like that, I can't stop myself thinking about Valley of the Shadow of Death by Fenton; I can’t stop myself seeing the work of Timothy O' Sullivan, and pictures of the desert of the American west by amazing American photographers. So not only do I project myself into the skin or into the head of different creators, but also into the skin of photographers of different periods. I'm trying to find the right connection between all these worlds, and it's a pleasure to navigate.   

Faulkner said, “the past is never dead, it's not even past.” And photography says that all the time—every picture you make says that. Have you seen Ghost Dance? It's a movie by Ken McMullen from the 1980s. It's all about reminiscence, or how images are bringing to us the presence of things that have disappeared, and, how we become a little bit like these people we see on the picture. It's very close to Barthes’ La Chambre Claire. There is an amazing interview in the film of Jacques Derrida—he is interviewed by a French actress who asks him if he believes in ghosts. And Derrida says yes, and he explains why. And he looks at her and says, “And now that I look at you, I believe in ghosts even more.”

And it happened that this young French actress died. A few years after Derrida was invited to comment on this interview, so he was facing himself saying to the girl that he believes in ghosts, and the girl is not there, because she's dead. But, she's still there onscreen and saying, “So now, do you believe in ghosts?”

And this is really what I feel. That through images there are some presences around me and I have a very strong appetite to meet these presences from the past. From the artistic past, from the scientific past.  And these presences, they involve new experiences for me.

A: I think that's immediately perceptible in your work, and one of the reasons I responded so strongly to Ô gué—there is such a tangible presence of the past, even though it’s a distinctly modern piece.

A: Let’s talk about Crazannes, your 2010 series of images of an abandoned limestone quarry. You said, “What interests me in this quarry is the space between the blocks…Quarries are architectures by subtraction. The site was gradually stripped, built elsewhere, the long alleys overgrown, but the displacement, the clues, reach us from the remaining walls.” I love that you record the presence of absence. Mallarmé, who of course also grappled with that idea, wrote, “My work was created only by elimination…read as the opposite of what you might think: just as it would seem ultra-negative, it suggests some pure vitalism. It reminds you of a sculptor pulling out the statue from the marble: chipping away at what was not the statue.”

LM: At some point, I realized that images can be viewed like that. There is a text called “A Conference” by Hollis Frampton, written in the ‘60s. The technical status of the cinema at that time allowed him to say that cinema was a construction by subtraction. He said that when you use the projector without the film, you have the full image, it's white, but there is the whole spectrum—the whole power of light bulb is projected on the wall. From the moment you interpose the film, it removes a certain quantity of the light. This is shadow theater, because the role of the slide is to remove a part of the light. What we perceive as an emanation of light is in fact removing of the part of the light, a subtraction.

So in the case of the quarries, they are a sort of materialization, because I tried to materialize this absence. The first time I went in the quarries, I was very afraid because they have been fully abandoned for half a century. I was afraid of falling somewhere, because it's quite dangerous—I was afraid to find some void under my feet and fall in a hole. After some time, and after talking with people who knew the place better than me, I realized that I was already in the hole when I was walking there [because it was an excavated site]. But what I say about the void was not clear at first, I had to make the photographs of the site to understand.

I loved also that these quarries look like the work of the 18th century French painter Hubert Robert. They also look a little bit like Claude Lorrain, and all those paintings from the time when they discovered the Greek and Roman ruins. And if you can imagine the missing blocks, you can imagine them as a sort of a construction of Malevich’s Arkhitektons.

A: You carried these geometries into the Déconstruire series as well.

LM: For that series, I made small volumes made of glass, and I started to play with them. In fact, the reference I had was one of the major German architects, Bruno Taut--who was maybe as important as Mies van der Rohe in terms of glass architecture. He did this marvelous glass game, called Dandanah. You can find different combinations of building architectures with this small game. So I did my own game. In the case of Taut the game was red and blue and green, in my case, it’s just plain glass, transparent. I made some constructions with this, and made photographs, big enlargements.

A: And returning for a moment to Somnium, why did you choose to depict those geometries as almost white, luminescent forms?

LM: In Somnium, the shapes are transparent because I think that all these geometric shapes are very close to the Platonic solids. Because of the link with philosophy, with abstraction, with ideas, I was inclined to build them with transparent matter. And in this precise shape, we see a mazzochio, the shape that you can find in Uccello’s Deluge. Some shapes like that one, and others, you can also see in my series Les Reliquaires du Diaphane. The famous 16th century goldsmith from Nuremburg, Jamnitzer, did a fantastic book of engravings of crazy geometrical shapes [Perspectiva corporum regularium]. They were just conceptual drawings, and I wanted to have them as objects. So I took the book and looked at every one of them precisely and built them just by looking at it. It was a lot of engineering for us.

A: In its mood and painterliness, your work almost feels like you’re carrying forward the spirit of the Pictorialists. I wonder if that phrase of Stieglitz’s, “Atmosphere is the medium through which we see all things,” resonates with you?

LM: Not so much. I'm more thinking in terms of background than in terms of atmosphere. There is the phrase of Rilke’s; he talks about the arrière-plan, the background: “Our fulfillments take place deep in the radiant backgrounds. There, in the background, is motion, and will. There play out the histories; we are only the dark headlines.” This notion of background evokes a sort of theater, where life and art become a little bit blurred. It is also a temporal background, a theater of memory.

A: So rather than an amorphous atmosphere, you're speaking about all of the scientific, philosophical, and literary reference points that give you a historic backdrop upon which to work.

LM: But it's also full of affect. It’s not only references, because these references to me are connected with desires of getting them for me, and with my own satisfaction, and with all the people who were full of desire for making these things before. Rilke also says…”If we want to be initiates of life, we must keep two things in mind: First, the great melody, in which things and scents, feelings and pasts, twilights and desires, all play their parts; and second: the individual voices which augment and complete this full chorus.”

A: As in Ô gué, which you shared for you is an image that has a whole history of visual images informing it. And finally, would you mind sharing a bit about your new series, Un architecte comme les autres?

LM: I love very much Le Corbusier’s last small shack that he had on the French Mediterranean sea shore; it was where he died. He drowned—he went swimming every morning and one day, he never come back. He had the small wooden shack in a very beautiful place. It was like a monk’s retreat. Very simple, just made with plywood. And at the same time, I had a picture, a sort of test that I did a few years ago, of a construction made of cardboard boxes, in black and white done with wet collodion, and I wanted to work again with this.

I had these things in mind when my friend told me, “Your dog is called Pinceau—you know, Le Corbusier had a dog and he was also named Pinceau.” So I wanted to play with the construction and to play also with the characters, and the dog became one of my alter egos in a way, the dog became the architect. I am his assistant in a way, and we kind of dialogue together, and he has a certain authority on the fabrication of the architecture.

The dog and the Le Corbusier head became like characters that I could speak to, or invent situations with, and it became a sort of small theater. The images are telling the story of the relationship of these three characters who confederate together by the construction. The small cabanas are not a cynical point of view, or a critical point of view about modernist architecture, because some elements in these very simple models can be found in modernist architecture. To me, it's just a simpler—not a poorer—version of modern architecture.

I also like the story of the generation of Greek philosophers called the Cynics. You know, “cynical” has the same root as “dog” in Latin--they were called Cynics because they were living like dogs, they were living at the lowest level of society. They were speaking the truth, not trying to please anybody, and so they were kind of rejected. You know the French writer Houellebecq? He writes, “Le poète est celui, presque semblable à nous, qui frétille de la queue en compagnie des chiens.” It means, “The poet is the one, almost like us, who wags his tail in the company of other dogs,” but in French, the tail is like the dick. So it plays with the ambiguity of the term because to Houellebecq, someone like the poet breaks the rules, like the philosophers.