The exhibition is the culmination of a photography residency at the Maison Auguste Comte, now a museum devoted to the philosopher of positivism. This Parisian apartment has been preserved almost exactly as it was since 1841, when the philosopher moved in. Deeply attached to the place, he called it his "sacred home."
The photographer worked both on site and with the museum's photographic archives, inviting the public to perceive the deeper dimension of this intimate space through a dialogue between place, image, and memory.
Each series draws on a device echoing the invention of the photographic principle itself: lens focusing, contact printing, negative/positive, diffraction. This experimental, observational approach evokes the method and teaching that Auguste Comte pursued, notably within this very apartment.
The archives are explored by considering the photographic object through its nature and its uses: negatives in their material form and their transcription of the world, albums as a play on identity. The collection of portraits from the Positivist Society appears almost prophetic of our own era, in which self-images are exchanged and faces shape a social "profile."
The nineteenth century was swept by the spirit of positivism, within which the invention of photography might well be placed. Revealed to the world by the physicist and astronomer François Arago, photography was seen as a gateway to scientific objectivity. Yet it would immediately lean toward artistic concerns as well. It is certainly in this tension between apparent rationality and sensory perception that one of the richest特ities of the photographic medium lies.
Maison d'Auguste Comte
The final home of the philosopher and founder of positivism, the Maison d’Auguste Comte is both a historic apartment museum and an archive and research library dedicated to the philosopher, his work and nineteenth-century thought.