Marine Hugonnier

From Anthropology to Films and Photographs That Expose the Observer

Hugonnier studied anthropology and developed an interest in ethnography, maps, and the relation between observer and subject. She has said that she did not pass through the conventional production routines of film school. Her works developed through access negotiations, walking, waiting, and failures encountered during travel.^*1 Still photography allows her to examine how newspapers and maps edit reality into a single image; film records the time required for a filmmaker to enter a place, request access, and move through it. Her choice of medium centers on how the observer’s cultural and political position shapes the frame. Explanatory records of another culture are not her aim. ^*2

In 1990, Hugonnier worked on the exhibition Passages de l’image, encountering an institutional setting in which photography, film, and video intersected.^*1 After the Cold War, twenty-four-hour news, international military interventions, tourism, and air travel reinforced the sense that distant places could be viewed immediately. Hugonnier takes that expectation as a starting point and builds into the work the practical questions of where a camera can enter, whose permission is required, and which position will be presented as an overview.

Turning Plans That Collapse on Location into the Film’s Argument

Hugonnier constructs films from questions and events that arise while moving through a place. The location changes the structure as production proceeds. She has described her works as fragile films produced by experience.^*1 The crew cannot reach the desired height in Ariana; the dolly shot in Travelling Amazonia continues into the night; a balloon accident interrupts the plan for The Last Tour. Film duration and the production process allow these failures of control to remain visible and become routes into military vision, road building, and tourism, instead of being erased in the edit.

Ariana: Reading the Military History of the Panorama through a Failed Shoot

The crew of Ariana seeks a high position overlooking Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, but local people refuse permission to film. The failed plan and the access negotiations become the subject of the finished work. Hugonnier explains that the panorama is both a movement of the cinematic camera and a military position from which terrain can be surveyed.^*1 The commanding view is therefore connected to the question of who has the right to look down from above, instead of being treated as a neutral aesthetic achievement. ^{*3 *4}

Travelling Amazonia: Camera Movement and Road Building as Related Technologies

The Trans-Amazonian Highway, advanced by Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, cut a straight line through the forest as a state project of surveying and development. Hugonnier worked with local people to build tracks and a dolly from materials used in road construction.^*1 The camera glides smoothly along the rails while the state road extends beneath it. Cinematic lateral movement and the line of development overlap in the same image, bringing the technology that makes space easy to survey close to the infrastructure that turns space into a resource to be conquered. ^*4

Art for Modern Architecture: Newspaper Editing and Collective Memory

For this series, Hugonnier removes the photographic area from front pages reporting events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the fall of the Berlin Wall, covering the space with sheets of paper that recall standard printing colors. Even after the image disappears, headlines, dates, and layout allow viewers to reconstruct the event. In a conversation with The White Review, she describes the work as adding another layer to the newspaper’s “present” and removing the image from the continuity of time.^*1 The absent press photograph measures how deeply particular images have been inscribed in collective memory. ^*5

In anthropology and news production, access to a subject is often treated as evidence of successful research. Hugonnier leaves refusals and limits of access in the work, making the question of who can photograph whom, and from which position, part of the film. A Jeu de Paume conversation identifies the mechanisms through which colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy shape images, together with the distance between observer and subject, as central concerns.^*6 Consent and power appear as concrete conditions of production on the way to a finished image.

The Last Tour and the Tourist Gaze

The Last Tour addresses the desire to visit a site closed after disaster and the difficulty of making the invisible available to a camera. Guggenheim Bilbao presents the works in Field Reports across moving images, environment, and colonial and patriarchal bias.^*7 Tourism can appear to sell a right to see, but disaster, residents, and state control restrict the available viewpoint. Hugonnier leaves invisibility in place instead of filling it as a lack, preserving the structure that determines who receives permission to look.

Apicula Enigma: Watching the Film Crew More Than the Bees

Apicula Enigma begins like a nature film about bees, then redirects attention toward the crew’s procedures, waiting, expectations, and failures. Mudam describes the mixture of reality and fiction as producing discrepancies in the situation of production, instead of an objective account of the subject.^*8 By showing personnel and equipment normally concealed in documentary imagery, the film breaks with the fantasy that nature presents itself automatically before the camera. ^*9

Choosing Film, Photography, Newspapers, and Books for Different Projects

Hugonnier uses film when duration and the process of securing access need to remain visible, newspaper collage when the editing of news is at issue, and books when the order of documents must be constructed. An interview in The White Review describes her method of temporarily taking up positions such as soldier, pilgrim, and journalist in order to see the world from different locations.^*1 The medium changes what can be seen and whose position organizes it.

The color fields in Art for Modern Architecture are cut to the dimensions of the photographic area and physically inserted into pages that retain headline, text, and date. The procedure makes visible the editorial authority that selects images, places them, and determines the importance of events. Hugonnier explains the series as a way of removing the photograph from the daily “present” produced by newspapers and creating another temporal layer.^*1 The title refers to Le Corbusier’s use of magazine and newspaper photographs in thinking about modern architecture. Architectural standardization, printing standards, and the reuse of press photographs converge on one page; the colored paper exposes the blank as something designed through editing, as much as the image itself.

Tracing the Right to See and the Right to Edit through Filming Apparatuses

The history of road building, military terrain, a newspaper date, and a refusal of filming remain concrete elements within the work. They keep the question of “the gaze” tied to specific events and institutions. Guggenheim Bilbao identifies the links among conventions of representation, ideology, desire, and colonial and patriarchal bias as central to Hugonnier’s work.^*7 In Ariana, access to the high ground; in Travelling Amazonia, the people who build the road and dolly; and in Art for Modern Architecture, the editor who selects and places newspaper photographs determine what can be offered as a total view.

Post-documentary practices can treat the photographer’s position, editing, funding, technologies of movement, and limits on access as objects of analysis equal to the completed image. Hugonnier leaves failed plans unresolved, and her films specify the infrastructures on which a camera depends. Jeu de Paume describes film here as a political act that reconstructs the apparatuses used to capture and re-present the world while searching for new regimes of images.^*10

Meadow Report and the Viewpoint Reorganized by Exhibition Space

A film unfolds according to a fixed duration; in an exhibition, viewers move among several films, photographs, and newspaper works; in a book, they can return to earlier pages. Hugonnier chooses a medium for each project in order to change the time of viewing and the method of comparison. At Guggenheim Bilbao and Mudam, films, photographs, and newspaper works organized by different viewpoints shared a space, and comparison emerged through the visitor’s movement.^*8 A Jeu de Paume exhibition guide likewise integrated films, newspaper works, photographs, and documents into one route.^*11

Access to high ground in Ariana, the road and dolly in Travelling Amazonia, newspaper editing in Art for Modern Architecture, and the human-centered viewpoint in Meadow Report each operate as a specific apparatus that organizes vision. In The White Review, Hugonnier records how cultural frameworks change the meaning of the same landscape from project to project.^*1 The broad phrase “politics of vision” can therefore be understood by returning to who selects a position, what enters the frame, and through which medium the image is distributed.

Guggenheim Bilbao’s exhibition materials and conversations with the artist organize Field Reports around apparatuses—filming permission, maps, roads, newspapers, and military viewpoints—that determine who can see what across several regions.^*12*14*15 Materials from Annet Gelink, e-flux, and Ingleby Gallery show that her project-specific movement among film, photography, collage, and newspapers has continued through gallery exhibitions and publishing as well as film festivals and museums.^*16*17*18*13

A conversation in BOMB and Vdrome’s presentation of The Secretary of the Invisible describe a method that returns invisible labor, unheard voices, and events that were never filmed to the present through editing and narration, instead of simply quoting existing footage.^*19*20