L'objectif de l'image

In French, the lens is known as the “objectif”, a word that carries the dual meanings of both “goal” and “objectivity”. While this latter definition illustrates photography’s long-held equivalence with impartiality and ability to mirror the world around us, the former underscores how objectivity has been viewed as a crucial endpoint in Western thought.

In “Les Formes du visible”, the anthropologist Philippe Descola writes: “We represent only what we can perceive or imagine, and we can imagine or perceive only what habit has taught us to notice.” Representation, then, is never neutral; it is shaped by learned habits of perception that delimit what can be seen and imagined. In this way, representation reflects not only the world, but also the visual and social regimes through which it is perceived.

“L’objectif de l’image” examines the ways in which lens-based apparatuses have imposed an optical rationality onto the landscape, particularly through the projection of linear structures across it. The research operates from within these visual systems, employing practices of reframing, fragmentation, and displacement to unsettle the apparent neutrality of images and to explore how they actively construct regimes of perception that render their subjects in utilitarian terms.

This project is grounded in two case studies that extend from the artists’ respective practices: on one hand, the relationship between regimes of representation and the extractive forms of occupation and use through which the Amazonian territory has been engaged within Western modernity; on the other, the representation of horses in early cinema alongside Europe’s last remaining wild population.