The Opposite of a Muse

September 18, 2016 9:49 PM

In the course of two decades, a medical secretary in Paris persuaded scores of renowned photographers to take her picture. A clip from the short art film “I (comme Isabelle)” about Mège’s work. [Nudity]
posted by growabrain (17 comments total)

I love this. I love that she did it. And I love that people respect her for it and write about it like this. It would have been so easy for photographers or journalists to present this as a crazy obsessive photography fan thing, and I'm so happy that they saw that in her role as instigator, collaborator, and curator, she is an artist too.
posted by lollusc at 10:49 PM on September 18, 2016 [10 favorites]

That trailer was disappointing...based on the article, I'd love to see Mège’s collection, but I have no idea whether the film accomplishes that. (Two decades sounds like not that long, actually, but I guess it's like anything else: if you never start, those twenty years will go by anyway and you'll be left holding an empty bag at the end of it. I hope Mège is satisfied with what she's managed to put together in those years, even if I never get to see it.)
posted by spacewrench at 10:50 PM on September 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

spacewrench: "I'd love to see Mège’s collection,"

There are quite a lot of images from the collection in a slideshow in the middle of TFA. They are fascinating. Many are NSFW. It's an extraordinary project, thanks for posting.
posted by chavenet at 2:34 AM on September 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Added a "Nudity" note for those affected who are surfing from work.
posted by taz (staff) at 4:44 AM on September 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

She is brilliant. I love it.
posted by oddman at 5:09 AM on September 19, 2016

a bit put off by the long discussion of her sex life vis-a-vis other artists in the article, but otherwise a great piece.
posted by lescour at 5:45 AM on September 19, 2016

That trailer was disappointing...based on the article, I'd love to see Mège’s collection, but I have no idea whether the film accomplishes that.

From the article: In 1996, the filmmaker Jérôme de Missolz, who died earlier this year, made a short art film about Mège’s work. “I (comme Isabelle)” is a twelve-and-a-half-minute arrangement in which a selection of her images, each illuminated by a spotlight, appear to the viewer in the order in which they were taken.
posted by Mothlight at 5:51 AM on September 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

There are quite a lot of images from the collection in a slideshow in the middle of TFA...

Ah, thanks. The viewer didn't work for me, so there was a spot that just looked like a missing photo. I'll have to go back and try a different browser.
posted by spacewrench at 7:02 AM on September 19, 2016

Yes, the slideshow is better than the trailer (at least at the resolution I saw it at). I suspect over the next couple of decades we'll hear ruminations about how much the photographers felt dragooned into this and whether they found themselves (recursively) an unwitting session player on someone's album.
posted by hawthorne at 7:16 AM on September 19, 2016

This was fascinating, thank you for posting it. There's something I can quite put my finger on about it, I find it by turns admirable and disturbing.
posted by Diablevert at 8:30 AM on September 19, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wow, that's a completely different article! Without the slideshow, it felt like it could be a send-up of NYT's unsophisticated readers:

Our intrepid reporter got to see this huge cache of never-before-seen photos, which she will now describe, 'dancing about architecture' style. You can't see them, though, because something about 3-inch contracts and noncommercial rights. And in case you don't feel enough out of the loop, here's a trailer for a delightful movie about these photos, which shows three more blurry shots and is narrated in French. You speak French, don't you?

And now, having looked through the additional images...they're individually nice¹, but I don't get the same sense of a uniform viewpoint from them as I do from a single-artist show. The NYT article, ironically, is well-written: it makes the project seem more compelling than it turned out to be.

I'd like to see a show with these, plus a selection of each photographer's photos from around the time Mège would have seen them. I bet there's something unifying in "why Mège decided to stalk approach these people." (Srsly, sending vials of blood, and the message from a stranger at the desk whenever you check into a hotel? That's the sort of thing that gets some people arrested.)

¹I like the Tourdjman "Couch" photo, and the color of Saudek's Izinka, but where's the common thread?
posted by spacewrench at 8:31 AM on September 19, 2016

Not NYT, though, it's the New Yorker? I didn't mind the French (although I suppose it's because I took the time to learn French in the first place).
posted by My Dad at 8:41 AM on September 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

"why Mège decided to stalk approach these people."

Hey, that sort of behavior helped her meet her husband!
She looked into his file in the hospital’s administrative department, found his home address, and wrote him a letter asking if he might see her after work.
posted by kokaku at 8:57 AM on September 19, 2016

mège n. a sentient mashup. An autonomous object who curates who will be her subjects.
posted by otherchaz at 9:08 AM on September 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

spacewrench, once you've seen enough of Joel Peter Witkin pictures, you realize that sending him three vials of blood is the perfect way to contact him.
posted by SageLeVoid at 5:07 PM on September 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

She is amazing.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 6:48 PM on September 19, 2016

“J’aimerais m’apercevoir à travers votre regard,” or, “I would like to see myself from your point of view.”

Ugh. Is it really that hard to find someone who knows French well enough to do a decent translation. She did not say "I would like to see myself from your point of view," which in perfectly cromulent French would be "J'aimerais me voir de votre point de vue," she said it in much more corporeal language: "I would like to catch a glimpse of myself through your eyes." Apercevoir is seeing through/glimpsing something, not just seeing something. À travers is also a seeing-through. Un regard is without the shadow of a doubt a physical, embodied seeing; not a disembodied "point of view".

Oh god and they translated something from her journal as "He calls me, I’m extremely moved, surprised, I feel drunk"? Good effing grief. That's not even decent English, what is this, I can't even. I mean seriously. If she was using the present tense, guess what, in French it's often used (so commonly I see non-native speakers fall into the translation trap repeatedly) as a way to describe the past as if it's just as alive as the present. Plus, aligning words without conjunctions in French emphasizes them emotionally. So, you're faced with a choice that isn't really one if you're a decent translator: translate it literally and it falls flat, as theirs does, or translate it into English that people can actually understand and respect as conveying emotion to the degree their grammar choices convey. "He called me. I was inexpressibly moved and surprised. I felt overcome." I'm betting she was using the expression je me sens ivre which is not "drunk" in this context, it's "overcome".

This is why translation is a skill, dammit. /one-sentence-rant

She has one by Eikoh Hosoe! So jealous. Wonderful collection.
posted by fraula at 12:07 PM on September 21, 2016 [3 favorites]