Portrait de Graham Greene. Photographie Originale de l'artiste

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original silver gelatin print, unsigned as are most of Trivier's works.
A precious original silver print by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists who, despite early international success, chose to limit his output in order to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier no longer produces new prints of his earlier portraits; the photographic paper he used is no longer available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with a particular focus on rendering the whites in contrast to blacks of rare density. A print by Marc Trivier is unlike any other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he hangs them in stainless steel frames of his own making, allowing the paper to live freely." (Xavier-Gilles, “Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière,” Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" is part of the work itself, just like the various alterations the photographs undergo when exposed: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but it doesn’t matter: the photographer is fond of such accidents." (Claire Guillot, “Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier,” Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity to the material nature of his work. While photography is by essence a multiple art, the artist’s direct intervention in every stage of the creative process imparts an almost autographic aura to his prints.

Trivier’s photographs of artists, the insane, trees, or slaughterhouses are all approached with the same precise and intense gaze.

“In his cosmogony, every thing, every being—plant, animal or human—deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude.” (Luc Desbenoit).

The beauty emanating from his photographs arises from their bareness. There is no retouching, no cropping. The same square format reappears throughout his work, reinforced by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves visible on his prints. This frame traps the viewer’s gaze within images where the disguise of color is rejected in favor of incisive black and white. With all artifice stripped away, we are not facing a staged subject but a presence heightened by radiant and singular light—a witness to a living moment rather than a posed one. It is this light, inseparable from the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier’s series:

“Marc Trivier’s photographs write a tragedy of light, one that only receives beings—humans, trees, or beasts—by burning them, before disappearance.” (Xavier-Gilles, Le Monde Libertaire).

Freed from all artifice, this light also gives his works the aura that makes them so strikingly alive. This “burning” light refers us back to a real instant, to Barthes’s “that-has-been” (Camera Lucida, 1980):

“After thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps what remains is this: a singular way of recording the burning of light, unfolding from one image to the next, a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers.” (Marc Trivier).

“Photography says only one thing: ‘It was.’ We fix only what has been. If there is a tragedy, it lies there.” (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists all sat for Trivier. At the same time, he also turns his attention to society’s margins, to what people prefer not to see. He photographs the insane and the slaughterhouses, setting them in counterpoint to the celebrated figures. By the late 1980s, his work had gained unanimous recognition, earning him the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 and the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devoted a major retrospective to him in 2011.

The portraits of major figures of his time that Marc Trivier produces do not aim to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with their gaze directed at the lens, they reveal a private intimacy:

“(...) rather than being one more portraitist of writers and artists, he sets himself apart through his method: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, posing for several minutes, which gives them a weary look. He perhaps awaits a more natural behavior. And so we find ourselves before Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault slumped more or less in their chairs. Intimate images.” (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, “Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier,” Marges, 2004).

Photographed in their personal spaces—most often their rooms—the subjects let go, losing control over their own image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragility of these powerful personalities, allowing Trivier to capture the unity between their private selves and their public work.

“I was reading Genet; for me Genet was just letters on a page. Then one day I saw his portrait—it was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? To make a portrait is to rejoin the name and the face.” (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photograph bears witness to an exchange between subject and artist, to a moment of real life. The photographer’s presence is palpable in each of Trivier’s portraits:

“What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but that particular situation that is someone taking the photograph of someone else.” (Marc Trivier).