A woodcut by the nuremberg artist Erhard Schoen (1491-1542), entitled A curious story concerning a French Chevalier (1536), presents two vignettes referring to a news story accompanied by a relatively long text in three columns by the poet Hans Sachs (1494-1576).¹ Each of the images presents a crucial moment in the story, and provides a hook for the narration. the first depicts a strange meal during which a waiter brings a severed head on a plate to the Chevalier’s table; the second shows his discovery of his two nephews, hanging behind a curtain. Death is thus illustrated in two very different but equally effective ways, in spatial constructions which, though simple, are striking in terms of the way in which objects are arranged. With hundreds, if not thousands, of copies being printed, this work brought a sensational story to a large audience.

Delphine Balley’s method is not wholly unrelated to that of Schoen, as regards her iconographic preferences, with a corpus that defines a very specific universe, but also the news items she uses, reworks and dramatises, or again her focus on narratives that cannot be fully related in a limited number of fixed images. Her main aim is to seize fragments of life, to take samples from the flux of reality, using sets of facts — established or not, but in any case reported — to define the pivotal components of fictions whose vector is photography. She composes, almost exclusively, series of between fifteen and thirty images, with the serial principle itself determining the narrative dimension that is her primary interest. Motifs and situations interact within these sequences to build up a content that is based as much on what the viewer actually perceives as on the mental projections or pathways he constructs between the chapters or tableaux of the fiction. The iconographic vocabulary derives from a reference universe that is relatively monolithic, but at the same time multiple in the way it relates to fantasy, marvel, horror and surrealism. Balley is also attached to a certain tradition of pictorial representation, namely that of painting, with its material qualities, brilliancies and substantive effects, as in Titian’s first portraits, but also dark or dramatic subjects, like those of Goya, or again a profound reflection on the composition and disposition of figures in the pictorial field, as with Vélasquez. She presents details that can serve to date a composition, and to ground it in a certain temporality, with objects, decors and attributes that refer to a context or ambiance which, while quite precise, may nonetheless be difficult to define. She pays close attention to accessories, clothes and wigs, which can be related, in a sense, to the theatrical world.

Family portrait

Balley’s photographic work abounds in anecdotes from everyday life, and minutiae which, though seemingly devoid of interest, are capable of inventing fictional spaces. the family has been one of the driving forces behind this deft balancing act, with its perpetual interpenetration of reality and fiction. In her first series, Album de famille, which began in 2002 and is still ongoing, Balley has drawn both on mundane occurrences observed within her own family and on dramatic events taken from newspapers, novels and television. But the members of her family are not just a source of material; they also participate in the image-making process. She transforms lived experience, or gives it a phantasmagoric twist, and her family has been essential to the transformation of real situations into something more sombre. The portraiture of a group is a painterly gesture that requires the coordination of figures who are individualised, but also interrelated, given that they are brought together in a pictorial story. Details such as the precise orientation of eyes, the repositioning of a hand or the general dynamic of an image have been central to the history of the painted portrait, as exemplified in important works by Rembrandt such as The Syndic of the Clothmakers’ Guild, 1662, whose general organisation reflects the definition the artist wanted to give this group portrait.

But pictorial references do not in themselves provide an understanding of the mechanisms whereby Balley’s photographs are worked out. Unlike the painter, who makes successive additions of material to the demarcated surface of the canvas, her theatrical stagings can take several hours to organise, with numerous additions and rectifications, before the image is captured. The time taken to execute a painting is embodied in the work itself, whereas the phenomena of “spatial cross-section” and “temporal cross-section” that characterise photography obliterate the preparation and implementation that go into the final result.² In the production of the image which is the culmination of the photographic process, the subject is detached from a precise time and place. Composition and preparation are absorbed into a fragment of a second, as an iconographic excerpt from the unfolding of a broader narrative that may already have occurred, or may do so in the future. In this respect, there is a similarity with the portraits of groups, families and personalities produced by the American photographers Clegg and Gutmann, where the preparatory work and attention to detail transfigure the nature of the portrait and impose a form of mental construction that goes beyond photography. In their portrait of an industrial group’s board of directors, for example, the subjects are not embedded in our temporality.

Mannequins

The metamorphosis of the subject that can be achieved by Balley’s theatrical preparation of an image also depends on the presentation of bodies that are immobile, in a state of suspended time. They are motionless, as in a sort of freeze-frame. The general apparatus in which the actors are seen is of a histrionic or dramatic type, but they themselves adopt divergent behaviours with regard to the movement of the spectacle, which in principle is incorporated into a temporal continuum. The individuals in the series are like petrified mannequins that haunt the playing out of the narrative. The characters invented by Balley recall the wax portraits of which Julius von Schlosser follows the history back to antiquity.³ It has always been a question of giving an existence to that which no longer has one, of conserving (by imprinting) the image of someone who has died, or of restoring the image of a dead person in situations such as the funeral of a sovereign. Balley manipulates her actors like wax mannequins that are remarkable for their realistic character, but in the end are no more than representations of an unattainable reality. And this analogy is further heightened by the fact that at the start of the 19th century the wax effigy whose purpose was to make a print visible was replaced by the photograph (Balley’s medium), the idea being to take an “exact, unalterable copy from nature” (Niepce). The relationship between mannequin and photographic image sets limits to the conservation of fragments from reality, while calling into question the fictional system that compensates for the degradation of memory. And this is the system on which the work we are concerned with is based: it is an endlessly tentacular entity that artistic proposals can make it possible to work with, or to reject.

News items

In most cases, the starting point for Balley’s photographic series lies in current events. By definition, as indeed in Schoen’s engravings, news stories are communicated indirectly, and they traverse several filters before attaining their true existence. We learn about them through the effects of rumour, cross-cutting references or eyewitness accounts. their images or traces are never more than clues, or pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and they can be envisaged only in terms of representations. the news story is essentially the germ of a fiction, the start of an incomplete story that includes elements to be developed, e.g. An accident, a supernatural or unexplained event, combination of circumstances. All news items are alike, and they are built up on the same basis, though in fact each one is distinctive and personal, and involves discrete destinies. Balley invents a new framework for the story, a set of decors and relationships between individuals, but she also has to write a sort of script to fill in the gaps inevitably left by the indirect nature of her sources. The constituents of the reality in question have already been fictionalised by the simple fact of being reported, but the invention involved in the photographic work adds a second stratum of interpretation and transformation. The resulting sequences of photographs can thus be seen as recursive specularisations of fictions drawn from fictions rooted in atomised, evanescent (ephemeral) realities. Photography makes it possible to extract the maximum potential from the referential micro-event, and to push it to its limit; to make it express itself in very different ways, and to explore its inceptive opening.

There are quite conspicuous surrealistic dimensions to Balley’s work: the use of bodies as mannequins; associations between objects that have no ostensible narrative relationship; the intrusion of motifs that seem to have come straight out of a dream, like the spray of flowers that replaces one particular character’s head — these are surrealistic pictorial strategies. The viewer is sent careering back and forth between, on the one hand, a feeling of uneasiness and fear brought about by choices of lighting and subject, and on the other hand an ironic, or oneiric, impression of entering into images that evoke bad dreams, or scenes from a horror film.

But the news stories used by Balley find their full sense in her photographs’ textual correlates. The titles of the works are often long, and they describe precise anecdotal situations. a sort of literary identity may also be imposed on an image, as though to open up lines of interpretation, or to use words evoking a particular ambiance as a springboard. In the 1930s, the photographer Pierre Jahan (1909-2003) introduced a surrealistic relationship between small ads and his own photographs. His system was in symmetrical contrast to Balley’s, with the content of pre-existing photographs being accompanied by the advertisements, which he cut out of newspapers. The resulting relationship between text and image could trigger a sense that was not overtly present in either. Which is also the case in those series where Balley uses literary fragments to establish a framework for the personal and mental construction of a story.

Mirrors, windows and enclosures

The fictional extensions of the photographs are stimulated and developed by two groups of formal devices: firstly mirrors or windows that open up the photographed space and suggest locations that are somewhere other than the interiors represented; then wallpaper, with its decorative character, which encloses spaces, playing the role of an enveloping screen. these two types of device make reference to the history of painting, and embed the photographs in another historical continuity, although the resulting games of aperture and retention seem to take on a particular signification in relation to the fictionalisation process. The mirror is a symbolic object in the search for truth, and it has often been used by artists, to be measured against painting’s capacity for seduction. in its fantasised, wondrous dimension, Balley once again confronts it with the degree of abstraction that art can offer in relation to reality. And windows make it possible to go beyond photographed rooms. everything occurs, most frequently, in closed places, but the labyrinths, as in a haunted house, always lead towards a potential exit. Each time painting wants to insist on the properties of a place, or to emphasise its particularities, or the impression it produces, an open window suggesting escape from isolation occupies an important place in the image. And here we might think, for example, of Caspar David Friedrich’s emblematic Woman at a Window, 1822, in which the window itself is the principal, crucial motif. Balley, by contrast, regularly uses richly ornate, highly connoted wallpaper in her decors. There are plant and flower motifs in large formats and contrasting colours that close the space and product surface effects. The allusions to Edouard Vuillard’s indoor ambiances, with figures that seem to be absorbed into a motif-saturated space from which escape is impossible, are practically explicit.

Modalities of exhibition

Questions about the openness of the image, and the ornamental details that can extend it beyond its actual nature, also extend into the modalities exhibition of Balley’s photographs. She presents her work in two very different types of context, which in turn imply different ways of understanding them. The first is the spatialised exhibition in a museum or art centre upon which she lavishes particular care, not being content simply to hang photographs on walls but theatricalising the space in keeping with the work done prior to the capture of the image. The photographs may be given gilded frames, like paintings. Furniture, decorative objects and wallpaper also contribute to the creation of a setting that allows the viewer to become immersed in the atmosphere generated by the prints. There is a desire to get him engaged, with an appeal to his memory, his childhood recollections and family history; and thus to play on the register of affect. The second modality of exhibition of Balley’s photographs is the publication of sequences of images in newspapers, magazines and reviews. She has done two series for Le Monde 2, one of which had resonances with an article on murder. She has also carried out several projects for the daily paper Libération, which have tended to be quite open-ended, while still touching on current events.⁴ The relationships created by a succession of photographs are stronger in a print medium: more immediate effects are produced by the convergence of the motifs, and the editorial framework confers an intense vibration on the multiplicity of senses that underlie particular images. the narrative underpinnings of these presentational forms are very different, but they are also mutually enriching, and they should be read in parallel for an overall comprehension of Balley’s work. Newspapers and magazines, whose main objectives are to inform the public, to problematise social issues, and to reflect, through the events of the day, on the individual’s place in society, provide a form of exposure that proves to be particularly effective in promoting a contemporary artistic programme.

Balley’s pictorial metamorphoses, as stories transformed by the kaleidoscopic prism of fiction, give rise to new perspectives through contact with the inevitably subjective reflection of everyday reality that is supplied by newspapers and magazines.