Les photographies de mariage, icônes familiales (Marriage Photographs. Family Icons)

The sacred is inclined to beat a retreat before the assault of
the technical know-how of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless,
the technical can sometimes find itself corrupted by the sacred.
In this sense photography is a canonical example of the
phenomenon. The sacred is omnipresent in every aspect: in the
printing and development that is accomplished by the miracle of
light born of darkness, in the taking of the photograph and of
course in the disquieting and equivocal vocabulary of
"exposition" (exposure and exhibition in French), "fixation",
"masque", and "révélation" (development and revelation), not to
mention the directly religious character of ceremonies
associated with marriage photographs, which will serve here as a
basis for a description of that dimension of sacredness which
inhabits the minutae of everyday life. Most marriage photographs
taken in the studio articulate two types of domain meshed
together but which can be filtered out separately. There is the
"ordinary" level which displays the trivia of everyday life.
Then there is the other, bathed in light, preserved from the
trace of quotidian banality. The first is the domain of the
profane and the second is the realm of the sacred. Pinned to the
wall or standing on the side-board, the marriage photograph has
the power of consecrating the home where it is exhibited. The
photographic image, as family icon, shares the space of
household life, a world which oscillates between the sacred and
the profane. The elective territory of the marriage photograph
is in the home, a sacred place where the rules of behaviour are
re written and which is introspective and detached from the
profane. (Magazine's Summmary).


Citaten:
Benjamin, W.: Kleine Geschichte der Photographie (1932)
Bourdieu, P.: Un art moyen (1971)
Mauss, M.: Manuel d'ethnographie (1971)
Leiris, M.: Le Sacré dans la vie quotidienne (1979)
Eliade, M.: Le Sacré et le Profane (1965)
Leiris, M.: Biffures (1948)
Huizinga, J.: Homo ludens (tr. 1951)
Evdokimov, P.: L'Art de l'icône. Théologie de la beauté (1970)
Wunenburger, J.-J.: La Fête, le Jeu et le Sacré (1977)
Hoggarth, R.: La Culture du pauvre (tr. 1970)
Sansot, P.: La Poétique de la ville (1971)