Renée Renard
First Camera, First Love
Artist Renée Renard shares her work and thoughts with us in
this new article series. How much are we, in fact, emotionally connected to our
camera and what makes it so special? Is it just an instrument that has to do
the perfect job for the price we paid? Is the newest camera always “better” or
do we have regrets leaving “the old one” behind?
On a beautiful morning in March we went for a walk in the
countryside. It was the first clear day after a long time and the sun was
shining through the trees creating the perfect background for my project: the
story of my great-grandmother as a young woman. The Impressionist atmosphere
made me feel like walking in one of Claude Monet’s paintings, with ever-changing,
vibrant patches of light and shade. My entire photo-enthusiasm ended abruptly
when I hurt my knee so bad that it looked, according to the doctor, "like
that of a hockey player after championship".
Background for my art
project about my great-grandmother
My husband, who is a very wise man, knew exactly how to keep
me busy and in a good mood during my convalescence: he placed the two drawers
with my cameras and my entire collection of old family photos next to my couch.
The Family-Camera
I live in equal harmony with all my cameras, no matter if
it’s the Nikon, the Canon or the underwater Olympus and most of the time we
seem to get along very well. I suffered a lot when my first Nikon was stolen
from right under my eyes and when the old Olympus broke during my visit in
Tunisia. The only one I unconditionally, tenderly loved was my grandfather’s
Voigtländer Bessa 66 (also known as Baby
Bessa, a folding camera manufactured between 1938-1941 and 1945-1950 by
Voigtländer & Sohn AG in Braunschweig, Germany) which my mother
gave me when I turned 14. My grandfather bought it in 1938, when my mother was
born, and it remained our faithful family-camera over 3 generations, witnessing
its entire, often tragic history.
My grandfather’s Baby
Bessa placed on one of the letters he sent from Russia
(“From Russia with Love”, detail)
My grandparents who ran a famous tailor shop in town managed
to get safely over WW2, but in January 1945 my grandfather was deported to a
forced labor camp in Russia. My grandmother and my mother were evicted from
their house and the shop was forcefully closed and sealed. Since my grandmother
was not allowed to take anything from their own shop, the same night she
entered illegally, risking her freedom, to recover the only thing that really
mattered: my grandfather’s Baby Bessa,
the keeper of the most precious family photos, shot a few days before his
deportation…
Holding it again and feeling its familiar shape and that
soft, unexplainable perfumed smell, I was instantly sent back to the times when
I was the only kid in Art school who owned something “so cool”. I used it until
1989, and when I finally began working with a new camera (it was getting
difficult to find the 6x6 film), it felt almost like a betrayal.
Lost and Found
Memories
A few years ago I started to organize our entire family
archive, recovering photos, documents and letters, including the ones my
grandfather sent from Russia. Since then my art project on our family history
has been presented in several art museums and galleries across the country.
During the exhibitions we organized workshops with children, encouraging them
to discover their own family history with the help of old family photos and
mini-interviews with their parents and grandparents.
Going through the drawer I was surprised to find an old
paper bag containing two 6x6 cm film rolls which I have inexplicable overlooked
all these years. The Baby Bessa
worked with a 12 exposures, 6x6 cm film, making its users carefully decide what
scene they wanted to take, in contrast to our current, “over-photographing”
habits. I remember going on a trip to Budapest, Bratislava and East-Berlin
in 1980 and having only 2 rolls of film (an average of 8 exposures for each
city!). Could we nowadays even imagine dealing with this limitation on a 2
weeks trip?! The 6x6 cm square format of the film registered a lot of detail
but was sometimes a real challenge in composing the image, which I learned to
adjust by cropping the image in the darkroom.
Image photographed and
digitally inverted from a negative film taken with the Baby Bessa
Since I had no quick access to scanning the 2 films or
printing the pictures I taped the film to the window, took a photo of each
frame and processed it on the computer. My “digital-darkroom” experience
revealed unknown moments of myself and my parents when I was around 5 years old
and literally made my heart go faster. At a closer look I noticed that while
photographing the film I also captured the current background through its
transparency, turning the images into a strange combination of present and
past. I could have easily made these colored patches disappear… but don’t we
all live in a permanent fusion of the present with the past?
“From Russia with
Love”, based on a photo and a letter sent by my grandfather from Russia. Image from my solo-show “A One Hundred Lives Journey” about my family history.
So here am I, the artist who works with family photos from a
saved camera, so many years after grandmother’s courageous action... It has
once again been close to me, as it has been to my family since 1938. I
carefully wrap the Baby Bessa
and put it back in the drawer wondering in what moment of my life I will hold
it in my hands again.
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