[Summer 2026]
“Look, you shall see”
by Érika Nimis
[EXCERPT]
Amateur photographs – family snapshots, anonymous portraits, ordinary scenes – are, above all, traces of gestures intended to freeze a moment that will become a memory. Most of the time, these images, when they are no longer being “seen,” end up in the trash, physical or virtual. In the best case, when they have been printed out and then forgotten in drawers, trunks, or attics, sometimes they wash up in flea-market stalls. It’s precisely at this stage, before they disappear completely, that Jacques Barbier and Élise Pic, alias le commun des mortels, swoop in.
Barbier and Pic are interested in saving from oblivion not historic photographs that foreground the artist’s authority but anonymous vernacular images, those that no one wants anymore. They offer them a new life and visibility in the studio, where they are cared for, shared, and poetically reanimated. The exhibition Dommage ! brilliantly illustrated their approach. By bringing to light abandoned family pictures, especially those that were out of focus, altered (by time, humidity, mould, or something else), or, in some cases, deliberately damaged, the show challenged our gaze by paying sensitive tribute to the surreal banality of these images that reflect our lives.
The beauty of damaged images. I entered Dommage ! as I would cross the threshold into a wonderland, a tale of a thousand and one lives, in which family pictures, having been lost from view and suffered the vagaries of time, are resuscitated to take control of the imagination in a great gust of freedom. The wonderland consists of cardboard boxes from the studio of le commun des mortels, in Simorre (in the department of Gers, France), represented by a mural-sized photograph at the entrance to the exhibition.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: TITRE ARTICLE]
Érika Nimis is a photographer, historian, and publisher, specializing in the history of photography in West Africa, and a researcher affiliated with the Art History Department at UQAM. In 2020, she began a photographic project on Ukraine, the home country of her paternal grandmother.