Article de Michel Samson. Journal le Monde du 28 et 29 avril 2002.

 

 

The reporter from Marseilles, devourer of the news in brief, became recognized as an artist with the publication of his photographs captioned by Rene Char and Michel Butor.  Now he gives us his take on the city of Venice.

 

 

Biography

 

1946 Born in Cavaillon (Vaucluse)

 

1963 On the street in Paris

 

1976 Photojournalist for Gamma and then for La Provence

 

1984 First exhibition in Arles; introduction by Rene Char 

 

2002 Twelfth exhibition: Behind the Scenes in Venice, in Marseilles, Venice, and Arles

 

 

It is not enough to say that Serge Assier is self-educated: he does not shy away from saying that he has “not gone to college” or from saying that he draws his creative energy from that fact.  As he remembers with a grin, in the beginning of the 1980s he worked as a photojournalist for 17 different publications from Menton to Perpignan where he was “scoring big” in a financial sense.  But a heart attack in 1982 made him suddenly realize that the “steam roller pace” at which he worked at photography was not the only path in life.  He wanted another type of contact with “human beings - one that included his soul”.  Rather innocently, he asked Lucien Clergue, the pope of photography in Arles at the time, how one organizes an exhibition.  “So, you want to play the artist?”, Clergue retorted.  Assier was mortified. 

 

A year later, in July 1984, he got his revenge.  The poet Rene Char agreed to caption his photos and in one swoop opened the doors of Arles for him.  Eleven exhibitions would follow, right up to 2002, where he has exhibited his “Behind the Scenes in Venice” since April 19th.  His photos of Venetians at work are again captioned by the quatrains of his faithful companion Michel Butor, who will also be present for the exhibition in Venice.  Dedicated to his somewhat maniacal passions, Serge Assier will himself escort the crates of photos, oversee their hanging, stay on for the exhibition, and repack his work before heading back to Marseilles and his job as a reporter for La Provence.  He never leaves an exhibition unsupervised, he never sells a photo, and he never puts on an exhibition featuring photos captioned by one of his famous authors who has passed away.  “I don’t make money off the dead”, he says simply.

 

As an artist, Serge Assier is both recognized - as the sheer number of his exhibitions bears witness - and reviled.  It is not obvious, however, whether it is his photography or the self-proclaimed populist man himself who should bear the brunt of this scorn.

 

First the photos: black and white, clean grained, contrasted with strong shadows, traditionally framed, playful in their use of interaction between objects in the foreground and beautiful backgrounds, and little left to chance. They are classical, rigorous, and far from avant-garde.  They revolve around sympathetic characters who gaze out with a human perspective.   Serge Assier’s Venetian universe, which resembles the universes he has depicted in Marseilles, Lorraine, Greece, and Corsica, is one peopled by the likes of men delivering heavy bottles of water, a woman sweeping the Café Florian, dockers loading windows on a barge, and a café owner’s hand on a carboy. As Butor describes the latter, “In front of a comb of bottles / The drink dispenser / Consults the latest news / And blends it in with the day’s conversation”.  There is a streak of Prevert in such lines which suit Assier very well.  Moreover, when we suggest that Michel Butor’s captions are sometimes a bit childlike (“Belly buttons, breasts, and tattoos /  kiss curls, jewels, fleece / sandals, stools, straps / forked fences, whispy flames”), he only reiterates what his hero Rene Char once told him: “People who enjoy your work will always put themselves on your level”. 

 

And now the man: sleeveless canvas jacket with the La Provence emblem, disheveled coarse short hair, and hazel eyes.  Serge Assier speaks tirelessly as if to hide the lurking fears of a distressed childhood.  What he has to say is hard and heavy.  Yet, it is above all his manner of saying it that engages.  Assier speaks the Marseilles street dialect that goes against the grain of academic French.  He speaks in simple, straight-forward words, but above all with an open, wounded heart.  When he tells of his first meeting with Rene Char, for example, tears well up in his eyes but are quickly beaten back with a smile.  “I took pictures of him when I was asked to, I left . . . , and then I went back.  I rang, and I asked who he was and if he might be interested in doing some captioning for my work.  He tossed me a book of poetry that I took back to the agency.  They all seemed to know who he was . . .”  But when he explains that the unedited photos of the poet, like those of all the other artists that he has accumulated since, are bound for the National Library and will not be shown or sold, the tears return.  He’s thinking of lost friendships.

 

The tears flow and cut him short again when, with visible regret, he starts in on the details of a life that could have easily ended in disaster.  Taken from parents that he never wanted to see again and confided to a family who fancied themselves shepherds, he had a miserable childhood.  “I cried every night like a baby”.  Subsequently, the “Cavaillon kid” fled to Paris to be a singer.  He ended up on the street.

 

Hate for everything bourgeois

 

Rounded-up by the police and racked with disease, in 1963 the young man was himself exhibited in a Paris hospital in front of medical students who were charged with identifying his sickness.  “I had such anger . . . these guys looked at you as if you were an animal.”  Serge Assier melts into tears and stares at the wall of the small restaurant.  Silence.  Then he mumbles, “In a defiant voice, I told them, “You are not treating me with respect!””.  His budding hatred for everything bourgeois was forged then and there.  Assier, not particularly modest, has put tremendous effort into “making it”.  Leaving the capital and the restaurants where he had begun to work, he returned to Marseilles.  He worked as a docker, an automobile mechanic, and a third shift taxi driver. 

 

Eventually, he was swept up by photography, which he discovered literally by accident in a crowd at the Cannes Film Festival.   Soon a part-time reporter, he threw himself into the daily news.  His cabbie friends would alert him to breaking stories in taxi jargon on the radio: “Fat fare on the Boulevard National”, whereupon he would promptly abandon his passenger and rush to the scene to get the first photos of the body before the police arrived.  He flooded editors’ desks with such images.  Obstinate to the point of obsession, he managed to get a press card while still a cab driver, much to the displeasure of other photographers in the area.  What followed was no pleasure cruise either - getting the local news and tabloid stories using every trick in the book in an often cut-throat business.  Yet, Serge Assier took charge and settled in.  The miracle is that, after so many battles, he has not lost the soul of a sad child.  It is the same soul that makes his solitary, independent exhibition photos fill up with such wintry nostalgia.