Emotional Proximity

Sabine Weiss (1924–2021) ranked among the most important representatives of French humanist photography. For six decades, she explored her chosen medium in all its facets – be it through her portrait and fashion work, in her commercial and street photography, or as a photojournalist for numerous international magazines. Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, now marks the centenary of the late artist’s birth with a cross-disciplinary exhibition, for which French visual artist Nathalie Boutté (b. 1967) was invited to enter into a creative dialogue with the late photographer’s oeuvre. 

While Sabine Weiss captured street scenes or (for her commercial work) studio orchestrations with her camera, Nathalie Boutté  meticulously cuts thin paper strips and enhances them with text – playing with the thickness of the letters and the space between the lines to obtain a grayscale comparable to that of old silver prints. She then painstakingly reassembles them into a likeness of the image that inspired her, creating a new artwork in its own right. In this particular case, the text used for this purpose consists of quotes by Sabine Weiss. The printed words only unfold their visual effect when viewed as a whole – and from a distance.