One of the winners of the first part of the national photographic commission “Les regards du Grand Paris” awarded by the CNAP and Les Ateliers Médicis, Karim Kal’s series Ligne Dée confirms documentary photography’s capacity for self-renewal.

Karim Kal’s work is anchored in the tradition of social documentary photography. A genre overhauled in the 1970s by artists and theoreticians like Allan Sekula, it became conscious of its own limitations. This impelled some of its actors to combine images with text, but it never abandoned its critical vocation, aimed, since then, as much at the conditions and situations described as at the images they give rise to, or not. Karim Kal acts on the terrain of collective spaces. He’s particularly interested in under-documented sites such as shelters, a hospital and a prison, and those whose documentation itself is incriminating, such as housing projects. A visit to Algiers in the early 2000 was foundational for him in this regard. He was struck by the contrast between the images distributed by the media and the serenity of the city’s inhabitants despite their victimization by ten years of civil war and recent floods. To rectify this, he made Images d’Alger (2002), a stack of offset printed sheets of four photos of the azure sky and sea as seen from the working class neighborhood of Bab el Oued.
There is a great gap between the depth of the spaces represented in that first work and the nighttime images in his latest series, Ligne Dée, where only the foreground can be made out. This suite, commissioned by the government for the “Les regards du Grand Paris”project, was shot along the RER D express train line than runs through the gritty suburbs south of Paris. Working at a scale that takes him from a descriptive documentary to what could be called an inclusive documentary, Kal demonstrates the capacity for self-renewal of the tradition he belongs to, in terms of its methodology, forms and practices.


GENERAL CONDITIONS

During the first decade of this century¹, Kal made photos that showed things in color and with clarity. Some were distanced from their subjects, like the series Cayenne (2005), about the outskirts of the capital of French Guiana. Here improvised shanties and housing projects are presented without much distinction, since some materials, like corrugated tin, were used to make both of them and even the newest buildings look like soon-to-be ruins. In other projects, Kal privileges close-ups. Stations (2006-07), a series shot in Geneva, Algiers and Douvaine in the French Alps, highlights the details of the occupation, or even appropriation, of public spaces by certain subsets of the population.
Kal’s documentary ambitions during that period rested on the alternation or combination of places and figures. Les Hébergés (2009) is a series of antonymous portraits of people living in the Emmaüs halfway house in Paris, while Les Miroirs, made the same year in a shelter in Évry, pairs exterior and interior shots of the building with portraits, as if the aim of this series were to record the impact of architectural structures on their inhabitants.
Starting around 2010, Kal adopted a new operating procedure that allowed him to empty out his images and leave only the most significant details. He began making flash-lit nighttime images exclusively. At first housing projects remained discernable (Logements sociaux, 2011-12), but Kal soon opted for a shutter speed so rapid that street lights did not register, and a weak flash that illuminated only the foreground. The series Abstractions (2013) is made up of frontal shots of a graffiti-covered wall. In his most recent work, details emerge around the edges of a central blackness. Human figures have disappeared from this nocturnal world, leaving behind only their traces in urban spaces. Emptied of all human presence, Kal’s photos rise out of their particular situations to give an account, as he puts it, of the “general conditions” to which they supply clues.
Kal’s operating procedure brings out the utilitarian, normalizing, coercive and securityobsessed character of the places where he points his lens, focusing on surveillance cameras andmassive concrete blocks placed to regulate traffic, and scrutinizing constitutive elements such as themetal grating covering the outside walls of a media library in Bron. Clearly this is not an example of the fashionable use of lacy netting in architecture but a way to prevent the slum edifice from being covered with tags and unauthorized posters. Kal’s flash brings out the hostile design of this building supposedly dedicated to the collective consumption of culture.
In contrast, he has lingered over sites that escape utilitarian dictates, like the vacant lots in a 2013-14 series, or surveillance, like the narrow alleyways between buildings. His current series restores the visibility of places usually left in the shadows.Walls, floors and ceilings are violently lit up to reveal the signs of a transgressive occupation. Like Kal’s other recent work, these pieces were shot at eye level and will be printed in large formats and left unframed so that they seem not so much photos as projection spaces. They show us things from the perspective of ordinary train passengers. Rather than adopting an authoritarian, elevated point of view, Kal wants to share their experiences with us.