MANN Robert Charles, Photography

In the mid-2000s, I was looking for a reliable and discreet master photographer to make prints of my personal photographs. I contacted the Herb Ritts Foundation, whose executive director, Mark McKenna, referred me to Robert Charles Mann, who had a solid reputation in the field. A relationship of sympathy and trust was born, which quickly developed into a friendship. I then discovered his personal work as a photographer, which I appreciated immediately.

Among his work, Robert developed a series using a pinhole camera - a small box like a miniaturised camera obscura, made by himself, with two holes and a light-sensitive medium inside. The latter records the daily trajectory of the sun from one solstice to the next, in other words for six months. This serial project is called Solargraphs, which he began producing at Chaumont-sur-Loire, where he has lived since the 1990s.

Over the course of our friendship of almost twenty years, over the course of his visits, Robert has set up his pinhole cameras at my home in California and in Provence, at the Château de Miraval where I now spend most of my time. Miraval, whose history dates back to the beginning of the 11th century with the construction of a Benedictine monastery, has been a hotbed of artistic creation since 1977, thanks to Jacques Loussier's founding of Miraval Studios, where top musicians from Pink Floyd to The Cure and Sting have recorded.

After acquiring the Miraval estate in 2011, I wanted to continue the story. First, by renovating the studios, which have reopened their doors to musicians. Secondly, by developing works of architecture - a lifelong personal passion. Finally, by welcoming artists from all walks of life (film directors, painters, sculptors and photographers) to take up residencies. And, out of passion, and to continue the history of this place, I am happily involved in the wine and olive-growing activities.

It is the Solargraphs made in this special place, where friendship, the beauty of nature and artistic creativity come together, that are brought together in this book. It is a pleasure and an honour to share with the public these works, which celebrate the beauty of the world and pay tribute to Miraval.

Brad Pitt

An art of “non-action”, or the deposit of time

From afar, a semblance of scratches, some in various shades of blue - azure, cobalt, blue-green, navy, indigo, mauve - others varying from gold to orange, trace a set of fine, arched curves in an uncertain space bathed in half-light. As we approach, the eye distinguishes familiar shapes: the slender silhouette of yew trees, other more indistinct trees, sometimes leafy and sometimes bare, branches that stretch out and appear to be nothing but shadow, the horizon line of a relief of hills or low mountains. Human constructions, too: here a pavilion, a roof; there low walls, the vague winding of a road in the distance.

The Solargraphs by American photographer Robert Charles Mann are initially striking for the contrast between their dynamic, chromatically vivid lines and the half-light, or even darkness, and stillness of the panorama. If something draws you to them, their seduction is almost immediately laden with ambiguity, as familiar elements are bathed in something strange - and strangely beautiful. These images have the power to disconcert. “One of my intentions”, explains the artist, ”is to create a metaphysical environment that is not necessarily recognizable, yet comes from an organic source. The viewer may experience a moment of confusion before identifying recognizable elements that, I hope, excite the imagination and lead to a personal memory or experience.”

It would certainly be convenient to attach these works to the artistic tradition of landscape, but the label hardly does justice to their singularity. What emerges is an impression of dreamlike abstraction, of de-realization, of dissolution of the world - particularly in some of the most recent works - that goes beyond a “simple” technical capture of the visible. The Solargraphs can be read in a number of ways, as long as you take the time to look through them, to let them resonate within you, between pure, unanalytical aesthetic delight and a more metaphorical or meditative reception.

First, there's a technical device: the pinhole camera. An object cobbled together by the artist himself: a whisky-bottle box with a small needlehole, in which is placed photosensitive paper. Strictly speaking, this is not a “camera” in the ordinary sense (no shutter release, no lens...) but a variation on the darkroom.

Robert Charles Mann is neither the inventor of the pinhole camera, nor the only contemporary artist to use it. What sets him apart is his temporality. At each solstice, he places several “boxes” in front of a landscape for a period of six months - until the following solstice, when he retrieves them - so that they capture, day after day, the sun's daily path. What the very long exposure of the negative records is time.

Intrinsically, these parameters, which are an artistic choice, manifest and metaphorize a disposition that can be described as contemplative or receptive.In this respect, his approach resembles that of the pictorialist photographers, transposed to the age of the surge of images on the Internet.At the end of the 19th century, in reaction to the emergence of mass, “amateur” use of photography after Kodak's pocket camera went on sale in 1888 (“You press the button; we do the rest”, goes the slogan), they asserted the defense of photography as an art - and not as an activity available to anyone.

Indeed, the choice of the silver-based medium implies a world at odds with the all-digital world: a single shot and, therefore, the possibility of accident, versus an approach that allows “mistakes” to be erased in a quest for the “perfect” image, adding to an overabundance of images with no singular value.
Also in contrast to the instantaneity of digital photography, the slowness of the process, which stretches over six months, evokes a metaphor or a transposition to photographic technique of that experience of duration that is meditation - a presence in the present.In this way, the process is more one of deposit, of receptive reception, than of seizure, of active appropriation.
In Taoist terms, Robert Charles Mann's approach in his Solargraphs is one of “non-action”: the world is deposited on the film rather than “captured” by the photographer's avid eye.

The low-tech process, cobbled together in a do-it-yourself, experimental spirit, the length of time involved and the motif - the landscape, the sun - all point to a certain relationship with the world, between a rejection of man's technological dispossession and the reappropriation of a technique that is playful and accessible.

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More than those of the few other contemporary artists who produce them, Mann's Solargraphs are part of an artistic approach that, already in his earlier work, has always had a strong plastic dimension. The Orbit series, in particular, showed the heritage of abstract pictorial photography, that of the experiments of Alvin Langdon Coburn, Raoul Hausmann, Man Ray's rayograms or László Moholy-Nagy's photograms.
His figurative series (Reflets, Fleurs) bear witness to a preoccupation with texture, the depth of black readily evoking charcoal drawing - and, as such, recall the approach of the Pictorialists, in their effort to emancipate themselves from “naturalist” or “verist” photography.

While the Solargraphs are distinguished from the other series primarily by their use of color, their experimental dimension is more clearly defined over time by the emphasis they place on chance and accident, i.e. on things that happen independently of will and control. Left to their own devices for six months, the pinholes may be displaced by a nesting pair of birds, or the photographic paper damaged by water seepage. The orientation, and therefore the panorama, is displaced, the negative altered, but Robert Charles Mann welcomes this imponderable element, which he retains during computer post-production.

What's more, these cracks, scratches and traces of chemical damage to the negative are highlighted, in a spirit akin to kintsugi, the Japanese method of repairing broken ceramics which, by applying a lacquer sprinkled with gold powder, highlights the crack. It's no longer a “failure” to be erased, but an element of the work's unprecedented beauty, the trace of the unforeseeable that took place.
“Letting the materials interact with nature, as is the case with Solargraphs, gives life to the images. The pinholes and the photo paper inside live on as the seasons and climate change,” sums up the artist. “You can only try to steer the process, but the variables are too numerous to control, so the ar5ste, if he chooses to let things take their own course, must accept the outcome... otherwise, it's better to give up altogether.”
At a time when faces have been doctored with surgery and botox, when artificial intelligence has produced deep fakes, and when advertising photoshop is rampant - in other words, a rejection of human naturalness and senescence, a hatred of reality in all its imperfection - Robert Charles Mann's art expresses, on the contrary, a sensitivity to the beauty of the impure and to fragility. His approach is reminiscent of that of musician William Basinski in The Disintegra5on Loops, recordings of short audio tapes played in a loop and deteriorating until the sound almost disappears, a dreamlike, meditative work that is also elegiac in its metaphor of death.
In both cases, a certain human idea emerges, one that does not reside in an inaccessible ideal but, on the contrary, finds grace in the stigmata of chance, existence and time.

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In L'art visionnaire, Michel Random, who evokes the Taoist dimension of Chinese painting,

writes: “Man is a center, establishing the relationship between the visible and the invisible. This relationship enables us to understand why the sense of the infinite present is the source of spontaneity, of the creative outpouring, that is to say, a natural communion, or a breath that integrates man with universal nature. Nothing is separated, everything becomes a continuous present. In this respect, the Solargraphs are, as Yves Klein said of the objects that make up his work, “no more than the ashes of his art”, the material trace of a process, the visible manifestation of a spiritual relationship to the world: that of a presence to that which is beyond us and cannot be mastered.

By erasing human agitation and engraving a superhuman time, invisible to the eye through its long duration, Solargraphs evoke a metaphor of meditation as the dissipation of time (the past that haunts, the future that anguishes) and as an experience of availability to that which is beyond each of us. Against the technical illusion of omnipotence and control, Robert Charles Mann's art expresses a profound humility, an atheistic spirituality that views the cosmos with silent wonder.


Mikaël Faujour

Artist statement

I hope one finds my photographs an experience rich in dreams and that they induce an exploration of the psyche. Several different lensless cameras are used to accomplish this. The pinhole camera has a way of suggesting objects rather than representing them because of the particular quality the pinhole image produces. This suggestive character carries with it a more profound mystery, which is not found on the surface of the image but rather in the possibilities of interpretation. The pinhole camera provides the aesthetic means needed for a subjective experience by the viewer. When this technique is combined with my themes and choice of subjects, the photographs begin to breath and become metaphoric environments.

A singular characteristic of pinhole photography is the fact that exposures are quite long, varying from seconds to hours, or in the case of these solargraphs, to months. This cumulative exposure produces effects that cannot be seen by the eye. Moving objects become translucent, having a vibrating quality, and some objects may become completely transparent in the process due to displacement during exposure. There are objects in my photographs that produce effects that seem unassociated with the object itself.

The Solargraph Series is an experiment in both method and concept. Using the idea that the path of the sun through the sky changes each day and that a long exposure will yield a cumulative image of these paths, I point the pinhole camera toward the sky where the sun will be during the six months from solstice to solstice, either winter to summer or summer to winter. The final image is not a montage of several different images, but rather the result of a single continuous exposure for six months of the sun. This work bridges old school traditional techniques with modern digital techniques. The prints for each image are made on pure cotton fiber based paper with permanent inks.

An image's significance may change with every choice I make concerning its qualities of contrast, density, and tone. A photographic image can be printed in thousands of ways. The tactile quality of the print is as important as the choice of materials.

These photographs carry the possibility of many messages. They are enigmas born to be deciphered by the viewer.

Robert Charles MANN