HORVATLAND - THE '90s - PROJECTS - 1999, DAILY REPORT - JANUARYGO TO HOME

1999, from my introduction to 1999, Daily Report

The idea of this project is associated – once more! – to an encounter with Henri Cartier-Bresson. Last November, at the opening of ‘Paris-Photo’, I met Cartier-Bresson, whom I hadn’t seen for a while and who was there with a mutual friend, the Italian photographer Ferdinando Scianna. While we were having a drink in the pretentious and badly-lit hall of the underground café, I asked him: ‘Henri, if you were a few years younger and still wanted to bear witness to the world we live in, would you take photographs in a place like this?’ ‘Certainly not!’ he replied instantly, ‘here, nothing is authentic, nothing is real!’ ‘Or else,’ added Ferdinando, with his customary subtlety, ‘this is a reality that is too complex for our medium.’ ‘I have tried to take photos in places of this kind’ I said ‘but I’ve never got a good one. Our world may indeed be evolving towards a virtual reality, that photography cannot capture.’ On this, we said our goodbyes, but I couldn’t get the topic out of my head. One morning, while I was brushing my teeth (this is the moment when new ideas tend to come to my mind), I told myself that the difficulty might come less from what our world looked like, as from my lack of motivation to photograph it. In the ’50s and ’60s, I was feeling an urgency to do so, partly because, after the forced reclusion of the war years, I was eager to discover it for myself, and partly because the magazines were asking me to show it to their readers. Then, in a second flash, I realized that 1999, which was just around the corner, would bring a new urgency to bear witness, very different from the one I had felt fifty years earlier, but no less compelling: any photograph taken during this year would necessary appear, after the 1st of January 2000, as a testimonial from the previous millennium. And in 10, 20 or 30 years, anybody who looked at it might find it as anachronistic and exotic as Adget’s images of Paris appear to us now.