Didier Carré:
Nudes in Shadow and Light

PHOTOGRAPHY | DIDIER CARRÉ       WORDS | CLIFFORD THURLOW

DIDIER CARRÉ is a craftsman. In Egyptian times he would have been overseeing the stonemasons carving the eyes of gods in the pyramids. In a war, he would be shifting the armies on a map, pinning the flags in place, organizing, classifying, categorizing.

CARRÉ creates hand-crafted black and white photographs of peerless quality - and perfection requires time, planning, dedication. It is an obsession and Carré is clearly a man obsessed. Like a painting, a picture is a long process that begins, he says, in the imagination and is constructed intellectually a step at a time:

SETTING, LIGHTING, SELECTION OF SUBJECT, POSITION OF SUBJECT, EXPOSURE, DEVELOPMENT, CONTACTS, PRINTS, PRESENTATION.

He is counting on his fingers as he leads me through his studio in Pigalle. It is like a museum with its shelves of cameras, so hygienic doctors could perform operations on the work surfaces. The warren of darkrooms he calls 'the submarine' is spotless, the equipment laid out with surgical precision, the water, gas, electricity and central heating pipes colour coded. 'Photography is an exact science. It takes many hours to produce one good image,' he says.

He is pointing fondly at the jars of chemicals which he mixes himself, everything made to a secret recipe. Carré even looks like an alchemist with his shiny eyes and quick, nervous movements; his voice is soft, and he thinks deeply before answering my questions.

We move on from the chemical display to the cropping room where he makes his prints on Berrger paper. 'It is French paper but made in Hungary.' He lifts his shoulders philosophically as a thought occurs to him. 'Nothing is French, the cameras, the enlargers. Nothing.' He picks up a steel ruler and smiles for the first time. 'Ah, this is French,' he adds.

He runs his palm affectionately over the box of Berrger paper and places it back on the pile. Photography went through its dark ages from 1970 when the manufacturers began to cheapen their product. There has been a renaissance in the last decade and, with the new paper, Carré's prints will last up to three hundred years. 'I can leave everything to a museum.'

His eyes are glowing again. This is important to Didier Carré. His mission is to preserve what he sees as a long but dying tradition. He refuses to use digital cameras. 'When you can send photographs through a wire, this is not life. 'Carré spent twenty years as a lab technician, ideal to finance his addiction, sharpen his skills, explore his passions. The perfect Carré photograph, he says ponderously, would be a naked woman wearing a distinctive watch, holding a knife and emerging from a car.

'I am possessed. All my life I like cars, watches, ornamental knives, women and photography.'

It is the shape and combination of these objects that interests him. He will find the common curves in photographs of a naked girl and a flight of stairs and present them in a diptych. He also mentions his love of flowers, which make fascinating weaves of shapes and shadows, then opens a flick knife with a dextrous flick of the wrist.

He reminds me that there was a time in Pigalle when everyone carried a blade in their pocket. Carré's grandparents moved from the French countryside to Paris in 1946 and he has always lived in this district famous for painters, poverty and prostitutes. 'Forty years ago, bad guys were shooting each other in the streets,' he says with faint nostalgia. 'Now it is just tourists looking for the sex shops.' Times change, but Didier Carré remains dedicated to his craft. Digital photography has made a serious dent in his cash flow, but still he finds work that just a dying breed of people can perform. When the Chaplin family in the United States acquired some old boxes of negatives of stills taken on set for classic Charlie Chaplin films from the 1920s, it was to Didier Carré's studio in Pigalle that they came to coax the old film into crisp new photographs. 'I am,' he says, 'a part of history.'

His one concession to the digital age is to put his photographs on the web at a dedicated site, but the rest of the process remains loyal to tradition. He is zealous in his quest for models and believes that through his black and white portraits he reveals a compelling truth.

'My work is about obscenity. I want to put in the light what is normally kept hidden. But in showing what is normally hidden, there is no perversion.' He says this with care, aware of the paradox, and again grows philosophical. 'In my photographs you can look at the naked body, but the woman is looking at the lens. She is looking at you. You see the surface, but she sees inside you.'

At www.gallerycarre.com you can study Carré's haunting images and the more immersed you become the more you appreciate the paradox.