For several years, while the medium of television was in transition from analogue to digital, Sophie Huguenot indefatigably followed and documented the news service of the francophone Swiss television station, Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS).
How do the current events of the day make it into the picture? What environment is constructed to that end; what shots are captured? How are images created and staged? How do the people involved position themselves in them? And finally, how does one deal with the continuous and often hectic production of information and news in the everyday life of an organisation? These are the questions to which the photographer devoted her long-term artistic investigations.
Along with her, we are given a view of what happens in front of, behind, and beyond the scenes; above all, in the spaces of the RTS television tower – a Geneva landmark. We are in the news studio, and in the editing rooms, in the sets and props workshop, or in the costume department. Or, we are on location where the events of the day are filmed – in the Taubenloch Gorge, in a tipi tent village, in the Federal Palace in Bern, with a gamekeeper, or at the Montreux Jazz Festival – and time slows down. It does so because Sophie Huguenot uses an analogue large format camera, which entails a technique inherently committed to slowness. What interests her are the moments of preparation surrounding the moving image that will ultimately be broadcast: arranging the set in the studio, staging the settings in the open air, the technical installations required, the news presenters in the make-up chair before they go on air. What all the scenes have in common is wating.
We are right in the midst of things, but never in the way; quite close to the action and near the main players, but never with an intrusive gaze. Sophie Huguenot directs the gaze casually and yet with decided precision to the edges of the events and their staging, thus allowing us to participate quite directly in the great hectic machinery of broadcast news production.
Reading pictures
In the world of photography, the book is a work predestined to record images and present them in a certain order. To display the more than 400 images in this project, Sophie Huguenot has decided to maintain chronological order, covering events between August 2011 (reportage on the town of Aarberg) and December 2019 (Federal Council election in the Federal Palace). The photo essay flows practically without interruption; there are no captions or locations provided. The chapters consist of the actual news reports and sites, although the transitions from one scene to another are barely noticeable, indeed rather inconspicuous or virtually seamless. The fact that we linger over the individual shots is due not only to the calmly surveying view of the action but also to the serial arrangement of similar shots into an almost film-like sequence.
The focus here is not on the iconic images or the particularly successful snapshots intended to attract our attention, but rather on the unassuming and banal, but no less narratively telling, moments that characterise the ordinary workaday life of broadcast television production. The book format, too, has its own effect. Tailored to the original dimensions of the 4 × 5 inch negative, it creates a small, compact volume that takes on the large corpus of images in an unpretentious yet quite intentional way. In the actual process of reading the images, it is possible to both dwell on a single photograph and become immersed in a cinematic anecdote.
The framing of the images in black – which is absent only where pictures are positioned at the margin of the page – is a reference to the contact print of a colour negative. This is no intrusive gesture to celebrate the haptic genesis of the large format camera’s analogue image, but indeed an astounding elucidation of each individual, razor-sharp picture produced through the long process.
The magic of image-making comes particularly to fore in the opening of the book. Sophie Huguenot describes the origin of these images as follows: ‘I sometimes happened to expose the same film twice. As a result, two different subjects are superimposed on one negative. What should I do with these images? They are part of my work. Chance produces unexpected results that only analogue technique makes possible. I keep them.’
Sophie Huguenot was never interested only in the image, but rather in the relationship between text and image, and the extent to which ideas flow through and between the two forms of expression. Her photographs certainly have captions that provide names and locations for the events. But these are not provided in the immediate proximity to the images. Rather, they are intended to be read as an autonomous text. She does not conceive of the caption as a dry, utilitarian source of information. Instead, she enhances it with journal entries and reflexions, creating a veritable working diary or logbook. What can be read repeatedly therein: waiting, slowness, patience, boredom until the right moment arrives to press the shutter release.
The text by Bernard Rappaz – former editor-in-chief of news programming at RTS and a long-time supporter of Sophie Huguenot’s project – offers a profound inside perspective on the digital transformation of the public broadcasting company. Jan Wenzel, publisher of Spector Books, explores the demands and possibilities of using photography to portray an institution and make its seemingly impenetrable reality tangible, thus providing a new artistic means of access to the world.
Thinking through the book
Sophie Huguenot already has a great deal of experience with slow and precise production of images and the creation of visual stories in printed form. During a student residency in Finland, she went on walks with her Polaroid camera, capturing her surroundings with a keen sense of pictorial composition and a particular sensitivity to impressions and moods. Each of the eight images that she selected for the four small-format leporellos, Promenade No. 1–4 (2007–08), stands on its own, and yet they combine to form an idiosyncratic, serene pictorial narrative. The Polaroid pictures are reproduced in their original size as well as recto-verso to unambiguously lay bare the reference to the instant photo and show the captions, which are handwritten on the back side of the prints. In her large-format photo book Karkkila – named after the town in southern Finland, and also self-published in a very small print run – Sophie Huguenot not only turns her gaze to the surroundings but also captures the people she encounters in powerful portraits. She made use of the large format camera for the first time for her final thesis project, 58 days, and decided to turn away from the speed and overproduction of digital images. In collaboration with 24 heures, a local daily newspaper, she spent 58 days during the height of summer following events that were covered in the daily paper and capturing with a steady gaze the incidental ordinary situations around them, which she then turned into a large-format magazine without any commentary. For Block 2008, Sophie Huguenot was one of twelve young photographers who created a sequence of images for a 366-day work calendar. The assignment was to present a multi-layered perspective on the world, tell stories, and capture concentrated moments from everyday life. This was when Sophie Huguenot first reached out to RTS and began to profoundly engage with the theme of current affairs by working with a large-format camera. These images lay the groundwork for her deep interest in the staging of everyday mechanisms and make palpably clear her commitment to place the human, be it present or absent, at the centre. But it was not until four years later that she made the decision to follow and document the incipient transformation of broadcast television from analogue to digital production. One of the first parts of this endeavour was realised in the small-format publication 4 × 5 (2012) – a work that was honoured with the 2012 Swiss Art Award and already demonstrates a sure instinct for choreographing the sequence of images and developing a purely visual narrative. This would then become a long-term nine-year project that now culminates in the present publication: TELEVISION.
I first learned of Sophie Huguenot's project on 30 January 2019. It took almost a year before I responded to her on 2 December 2019, and we finally met in Zurich on 21 January 2020. We met regularly from then on, allowing me to follow the genesis of the book – in which the most important ‘partner in crime’ from the very beginning was the book designer Nicolas Eigenheer. A book needs its incubation period too, until the initial conceptual and formal ideas are in place. And the right project partners must be found to ultimately define the final image selection and organisation, determine the layout, font, and appearance, commission the image processing and printing, and finally land at the right publishing venue – in our case, Spector Books.
All the various parameters of a book can be handled in so many different ways and are subject to numerous debates. Sophie Huguenot tackled the issues with tenacity and persistence, and also threw herself with equal passion into the work of exploratory collaboration with everyone involved in the book.
Sophie Huguenot’s long-term project is far more than a documentation. It is a visual essay that provides a unique perspective on the staging of the news, and prompts us to consider the social significance of information, how this is produced, and how it influences our image of ourselves and of reality. It is the slowness and the calm that the artist loves. And this enables her to immerse herself and her large format camera in the fast-paced reality of television – and us along with her as recipients. The work invites us to reflect on the production and dissemination of images, but also on the way we perceive our environment.