Bruit De Fond - Background Noise.

Bruit De Fond. Background Noise. Curated by Aurelien Arbet, Jeremie Egry and Nicolas Poillot. JSBJ, 2010. 160 pp., colour illustrations throughout, 8¼x10¾".

A beautiful book, and a beautiful thought-process.

Book description:

"The border between different artistic media is meant to disappear to reveal interstices loaded with creativity. This publication is one of them.

A collection of images and photographs conceptualized and elaborated around what links sonic elements to visual ones.

This publication exhibits and questions different levels of interpretation between these two media.

How can one photograph noise? Silence?
Can we hear with our eyes and see with our ears?
Is noise inevitably associated to movement and silence to inactivity?
Why is noise a problem?

In this publication we aim to distance ourselves from the basic relationship existing between music and photography, avoiding pictures of gigs, bands or instruments.

We wish to present pictures that come out of the direct collaboration between noise and photography, taken instinctively and randomly. Pictures of places, moments or people where the notion of noise is perceptible instantly.

We also wish to present works from people that deal with this theme in a conscious and conceptual way.

This book deals with the notions of high and low definition of an image and encourages people to think about contemporary estheticism through different techniques: film or digital cameras, pictures that were found, screenshots or video samples…

Noise in photography can also be revealed by using certain devices to distort digital files or negatives.

The image produced then shows new properties - grain as an emotional variation -

These variations modify space and carry an immaterial energy named wave and revealed by photography.

In that sense, 'Bruit de fond' (Background noise) becomes a collection of more or less stronger disturbances.

'Bruit de fond' questions our senses and our perception. This book questions the notion of photography by proposing to educate one to listening to pictures and looking at noise."