When I was young, I was lucky enough not to go to art school.

Introduction

Human beings are complex. We live inside our heads and look out on the world, assaying and interpreting all that we see – most especially our fellow human beings. Because we understand what it is like to be inside our own head, we long to know a little of that experience in others. To sense what we imagine might be the essence of another person. A spiritual individual might consider this the soul, a sociologist the sedimentation of experiences shaped by the exterior world, a scientist the interactions of a near infinite network of chemical and electrical pathways. Whatever the paradigm, when we look, we do so through the lens of our own distinct perspective. The beholding eye.

Much of the work of the French artist William Ropp has channelled this desire to know and feel how another might know and feel. His portraits do not simply map the surface of an individual to show how they looked at this moment, in this light. They do not set a social context so that we might build a picture of their day-to-day lives outside of the photographic instant. Indeed, many of his images have an otherworldly quality that expressly lifts the subject out of the quotidian and into a place removed. A place where being is momentarily freed from the narrative web of the here and now. These are intensely personal images. They invite you in to consider one human being beheld by another in ways that make no pretence of objectivity. Each is self-contained, a glimpse of immanent connection.

William Ropp’s images have a unique signature. They could not have been made by anyone else. They are hard to set within the art-historical taxonomy, which is perhaps because he did not attend art school. He received no formal training that would direct his creativity along established paths. Instead, he began, quite literally, in the dark, building his own iconographic language from light itself.

Alasdair Foster

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Interview

How would describe your approach to photography?

As far back as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by the human being as a whole. This fascination was first expressed through books (I devoured them daily), then through theatre (as a director), and finally (at the age of twenty-seven) through photography. I have a deep respect for human beings that I think is reflected in my photographs. My images come from the depths of the soul. They’re true – this cannot be faked.

The subjects of your early images were actors…

It was through theatre that I gradually left the enclosed world of books and opened up to the real world. It was through theatre that I learned the importance of silence, breathing, and introspection, all of which, in my opinion, are the prelude to a good portrait.

[Left] © William Ropp ‘Raymond as a Ballet Dancer’ from the series ‘Polaroids’
[Centre] © William Ropp ‘Me and Myself’ from the series ‘Mexico’
[Right] © William Ropp ‘Didier and Fish’ from the series ‘Perfect Finish’

Why did you begin light painting?

Painting with light struck me as highly poetic. It’s important to understand that in those days there were no immediate results. The method was necessarily empirical and you had to wait until the film had been developed to see the result. This involved many attempts to get it right, so I began with still life before I dared to address the human being. When I did, I found that my models, immersed in darkness without the photographer peering at them from behind the camera’s glass eye, were able to relax. They became absorbed in their own thoughts, and this imbued their face with a deep serenity.

You also experimented with different types of film…

For the first few years, I used infrared film, which is hyper-sensitive to light and has a characteristic graininess with incomparable softness in the shadows. At the time, few people used this film for portraits, and it lent my images a highly distinctive visual signature.

Then I discovered Polaroid film, which gave immediate results. I went straight from using 35mm to a large-format view camera. And later I was even invited to Prague for a three-day session using one of the mythical 50 x 60cm Polaroid view cameras.

[Left] © William Ropp ‘I’d Make Your Thoughts My Own’ from the series ‘Russia’
[Centre] © William Ropp untitled from the series ‘Russia’
[Right] © William Ropp ‘Alma’ from the series ‘Mexico’

Do you see these images as portraits of the individuals you are photographing?

I call them ‘intimate portraits’. They are the opposite of social portraits where we self-consciously present ourselves to others to show that we are intelligent, handsome, sensitive, or whatever. I think that pointing a camera at someone generates a kind of stress that makes you ask yourself the stupid question: How am I going to look? Working in darkness during exposure times of several minutes avoids triggering this self-consciousness.

The otherworldly quality of those early images continued in your portraits of children. How did this work begin?

Without wishing to get into supermarket psychology, the fact that my wife Claire and I didn’t have any kids certainly has something to do with it. (As an artist, Claire often paints children.) The children I chose to photograph have certain characteristics: they are not hyperactive but rather they are prone to daydreams and contemplation. There was always a familiar adult with them so that the child could feel a reassuring presence beside them. I would ask both child and adult to settle down so that they felt good. This was especially important if the pose was to last several minutes as I moved around them with a torch. It was also important that their eyes did not wander during the long exposure. And so, I placed a small point of light above the camera, on the axis of the lens, which, like a lighthouse, directed their gaze.

[Left] © William Ropp ‘Twin Brothers’ from the series ‘The Eye of a Dream’
[Centre] © William Ropp ‘The Wounded Angel’ from the series ‘The Eye of a Dream’
[Right] © William Ropp ‘Orphan’ from the series ‘Russia’

In this and in much of your subsequent work, the eyes become a particular focus…

As Cicero said: the eyes are the mirror of the soul. Better than words, the eyes express a whole gamut of feeling – I love to lose myself in them. And then there’s that surprising thing – something that doesn’t exist in real life – that, no matter where you are, the person in the photograph never stops looking at you. On the other hand, when the person photographed averts their eyes, they will never look at you. I call this the ‘inner gaze’.

You have made an extensive body of work in Africa. How did this begin?

I was forty years old when the idea of going to Africa first came to me. I wanted to open up my creative horizon, to leave the protective cocoon of the studio – to avoid the danger of simply repeating myself. And there was a family connection. My great-great-grandfather Louis Jacolliot had himself set off for Africa in the 1880s. A renowned writer, he recounted his African adventures in stories reminiscent of Jules Verne. Those stories had captured my childhood imagination and that’s undoubtedly where my attraction to this continent was born.

My first trip to Mali was a real disappointment. I arrived in Dogon Country in March, in the middle of the dry season. I was trapped. Caught up in the ambient misery, I captured it without distancing myself. The result was a sad and despairing image of Africa, far from what I wanted to convey. Then, on the last day, like a miracle, came a photograph of a young boy, exuberant in his improvised shower. [See ‘Waiting for the Rain’ further down the page] It was a revelation: Water… the lifeblood of Africa, source of joy, life, abundant culture, and satiety. Water would become the common thread running through all my future travels.

[Left] © William Ropp ‘African Madonna’ from the series ‘Ethiopia’
[Centre] © William Ropp ‘My Inner Eye’ from the series ‘Ethiopia’
[Right] © William Ropp ‘The Blue Bird’ from the series ‘Ethiopia’

You then began to move away from analogue to digital image making, and from light-painting to digital post-production to create your work. What prompted that change?

Several reasons… I had spent more than twenty years working almost daily in my photographic laboratory. That was long enough. The world was moving on and it was exciting. I found the early digital cameras far too sophisticated. But, once I became interested in colour, I had no choice because I didn’t want to delegate the management of my prints. I discovered post-production… What a pleasure! Instead of a stressful couple of minutes under the enlarger, I had hours to fine-tune my prints.

Another thing that digital has brought to my photographic practice is lightness. Let me explain. Previously, the decision to photograph a person was fraught with uncertainty. Once the shot had been taken, it took at least two days of intensive work to begin to visualise the result. With digital, once the session is over, it only takes an hour or so to appreciate the qualities or faults in an image. It meant that I could be more daring – risk more – when investing myself in a photographic relationship.

How did you arrive at your distinctive handling of colour?

My palette is very limited – usually only two or maybe three colours, sometimes just one. Colour is a trap for the eyes; it superficially flatters our aesthetic sense. In my opinion, this overly ‘pretty’ appearance prevents you from penetrating the photograph. By limiting my colour palette, I seek to avoid this pitfall.

[Left] © William Ropp ‘Brothers’ from the series ‘The Eye of a Dream’
[Right] © William Ropp ‘Brother and Sister’ from the series ‘The Eye of a Dream’

How do you select the people you photographed?

If I put the African work aside for a moment, I have almost never approached a person in a public place. For one thing, I am shy and, for another, being photographed is a gift of self, a serious proposition unsuited to the triviality of a bistro encounter. The people I photograph are either drawn from my extended circle of friends or they become known to me through my exhibitions. Indeed, when you feel a person is captivated by one of your photographs, it is only a short step to imagining them as a participant in that world.

Conversely, in Africa, I discover the people I photograph in the magic of encounter. Let me give you an example… I am in the Lalibela Amhara Region of Ethiopia. I enter one of its excavated churches, which dates back to the twelfth century. There is a moment suspended outside of time as I stand a few meters from a monk as beautiful as a god, who stares at me fixedly with an air of infinite goodness. I can’t take my eyes off him. Then inexplicably I begin to cry as I try to capture his image. Why this emotion? I have no idea. Maybe the answer is in the photograph.

But if you ask me why I choose one person and not another, I cannot say. It is down to intuition and emotion.

[Left] © William Ropp ‘À Fleur de Peau’ from the series ‘Ethiopia’
[Centre] © William Ropp ‘Whoever Rubs It, Pricks It’ from the series ‘Ethiopia’
[Right] © William Ropp ‘À Fleur de Peau’ from the series ‘Ethiopia’

Flowers and vegetation become an important part of a number of these images. What led you to those forms of visual construction?

In Ethiopia, especially in the Omo Valley, it’s not uncommon to come across the Surma, who are considered the flower people of Ethiopia. On the one hand, this is said to expresses their love of nature; on the other, it’s understood as a way of sublimating their beauty. By digitally ‘tattooing’ flowers into their skin, I’ve sought to visualise their metamorphic desire to melt body and soul into the nature with which they live in perfect symbiosis.

Later, I realised that long before I visited Ethiopia, I had already observed this desire to merge with Nature during my first trips to Mali. Witness this photograph [below centre] of a child voluptuously languishing in the belly of a tree… a prelude to a dreamlike birth. Or another image [below right] of a young teenager crowned by a spray of water, Mother Nature’s bridal veil… I could think of myriad other examples.

[Left] © William Ropp ‘Waiting for the Rain’ from the series ‘Mali’
[Centre] © William Ropp ‘Mother Nature’ from the series ‘Mali’
[Right] © William Ropp ‘The Wedding’ from the series ‘Mali’

In addition to making these intimate portraits you have also made work that explores the nude as an expressive form. What interests you about the human body as a creative inspiration?

When I was younger, I carried out an interesting experiment: I made two portraits, both tightly framed to the head and neck. In one, the person was wearing clothes, in the other, she was naked. The vulnerability and fragility revealed by the second portrait was a prelude to my work on the delicate relationship between human beings and their bodies and each other. In my nudes, the subject’s gaze is often very present, perhaps questioning the viewer’s own relationship with nudity. This can be uncomfortable – who’s looking at whom? But as Jan Saudek has so rightly said: “Art is not here to answer questions – it is here to pose them”.

[Left] © William Ropp ‘I’m Losing My Head’ from the series ‘Nudes’
[Centre] © William Ropp untitled from the series ‘Nudes’
[Right] © William Ropp ‘Entangled Within Myself’ from the series ‘Nudes’

The body has always been a great source of inspiration for me. I imagine that if I photographed trains, my creativity would quickly be exhausted. But with the human body, as with the human face, the expressive possibilities are infinite. I approach photographing a nude as I would a landscape… with light playing over volumes, hollows, bumps, scars… In this approach to the nude, I have been described as a sculptor of shadows, and it’s true that those images created with a torch surely deserve that appellation.

Your approach to the body in your artmaking has ranged from the abstract and the expressionistic to the narrative and fantastical. What shifting ideas or feelings did you seek to explore in this evolving aesthetic approach.

In your question, you use the word explore, which is really the feeling I get as a photographer – that of an explorer. When I was young, I was lucky enough not to go to art school. They have this annoying habit of formatting you. The teachers come from these same art schools and are very often frustrated artists intolerant of all forms of non-institutional artistic representation. But, as I have said, my youthful culture was literary, without any formal iconographic education. Consequently, I approached the representation of the human figure with the freshness and naivety of a layman.

[Left, Centre and Right] © William Ropp ‘Claire’ from the series ‘Claire Obscure’

You are currently preparing a book of photographs of your wife, Claire.

This book is a hymn to love, my song told in images, a tribute to the woman I love, have loved, and will always love. It celebrates timeless moments when, in the darkness necessary for the magic to happen, the dance of light pieced together – beam by beam – the puzzle of her body. Complicit and happy, far beyond the role of model, Claire gave substance to my dreams; suggested without ever imposing, like a clairvoyant muse. She is a great soul, an ancient soul who knows much and says little, as only the wise know how. I love her.

In making your work over the years, what has photography taught you?

That’s a vast and essential question, and it seems to me that every day brings a new answer. There’s no doubt that the act of photography is and has been a formidable tool for opening up to the real world, an insatiable and ever-renewed quest for the other. There are two words spoken by my late mother that have served and still serve me as a guide: love and knowledge. Love in its broadest sense – love of life, of others… free of religious connotation.

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William Ropp’s work has been widely published internationally, including ten monographs: ‘William Ropp’ [Ken Damy Museum Editions 1996], ‘Children’ [Kehrer Verlag and Éditions de l’œil 2004], ‘Dreamt Memories from Africa’ [Éditions Vevais 2008], ‘William Ropp: 20 Years in Photography’ [Voenoot Editions, Éditions de l’œil, and Minotaurus 2009], ‘Mémoires Rêvées d’Afriques’ [Éditions de l’œil 2009], ‘Faces’ [Editions de L’œil 2012], ‘The Color of Compassion’ [Vevais Gallery Editions 2012], ‘Ethiopiques’ [Éditions de l’œil 2015], ‘Uthiopie’ [Éditions de l’œil 2018], and ‘Regards from Lucy’ [Editions Empreintes et Digitales 2021]. His forthcoming book ‘Claire Obscure’ will be published by Empreintes et Digitales later this year. He lives with his wife Claire in Nancy, France.

Photo: Tom Hatlestad

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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