Passer Par Le Feu

Time is the fire that consumes us
Delmore Schwartz

When we go through the fire there are things that are burned and things that persist. Youth goes through fire, it weakens and reveals it. Time has passed through fire: here it is burned, irradiated. The blossoming, the full flowering, these images are those of a past season. Friendship, joy, experimentation, cross-dressing, wandering, research. The photographs are the traces of a bygone past and the persistence of a love. These photos were found in the junk of an artist's studio, at the bottom of a somewhat forgotten box. A first selection was made from this stack of color slides. This selection was burned during a fire. The plastic boxes and slide frames melted, but the images survived, protected in cardboard licked by the flames. These images are survivors of time and this accident. They are also the persistence of a desire which gave birth to this book.

photographs by Sophie Fougy
editing and design Joseph Charroy
cover text taken from The Psychoanalysis of Fire by Gaston Bachelard