About. 

So, how does “photography” work with Lucile Risch? Originally from Luxembourg, she carries with her, and in her work, the baggage of an earlier career as a dancer and choreographer, actually essential to her. Her first works shown at the Hoffmann Gallery dealt in an unusual way with a sampling of bodily postures, in the relationship of first the couple, and then the group. The man is often silent and the woman shuts her eyes, says the artist. This is a postulate that needed demonstrating, in the guise of a prelude to the various series that ensued.

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The Photographic Act of Capture 

For Lucile Risch, catching movement with a still image offers more prospects than the filmed, moving image. It is true that the photograph freezes trajectories and movements; but the ex-dancer and choreographer, who is an expert in notation, literally turns with her models. The shot becomes a choreographic act, attuned to the impulses triggered by the instruction given. “All the gestures through which the photographer moves, either drawing closer to or further away from his object, turns around, frames in his viewfinder, presses on his button, then winds on the film, before pressing the button once again, are part of the operation that symbolizes the event in the sensory- affective-motor mode.”The definition given by Serge Tisseron is oddly in agreement. With her close-ups, Lucile Risch seems to be on the lookout for the slightest beat of the epidermis, the tiniest muscular contraction, the slightest tension that might culminate in a gesture. She becomes physically involved, twists and arches as much as is called for to enable her to accompany her subjects in the symbolization of their relation. The artist even seems to use the shutter release of her camera as a metronome which beats out the time and maintains the tempo of the presentation. The photographer counts the dancer's times and steps, and eagerly announces them every time she cocks her film. One suddenly thinks of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who conjures up the “physical joy, time and space together” sensed during the photographic act. With Lucile Risch, it is impossible to separate product from process, or the image from the method producing it. “The photographer is in equilibrium in the air like the figures in motion whose course he tries to freeze. At times the dance springs from his body like the expression of his desire for physical compatibility with the rhythmic structure of the world.”

Cécile Camart
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