Logic would dictate that Krass Clement, born on March 15th 1946 in Copenhagen, would go into film making after his studies at the Danish Film School. Following in the footsteps of Dreyer, one way or another, could have been advantageous for the young Dane, but he preferred photography. So it was more as an autodidact that he approached this medium, so democratic and, on the face of it, so simple, that he had practiced elsewhere as an adolescent ( first photos at age 13 ).
His first book, Skygger af Ojeblikke/Shadows of Moment, suffused with a gentle melancholy, appeared in 1978. Finding the spots, dear to strollers, that he is fond of, stations, parks, cemeteries… And these unknown people , he met here and there, whose silent, almost existential, expectation he shares. Perhaps Krass Clement already knows that he has found his way, creating books, travelling, looking intensely, discovering his compatriots in their own environment (at a cycle race, or on a ferry) or leaving in search of these unknowns that look so much like him in Lisbon, Moscow, or Damascus.
Since Shadows of Moments, Clement has published about twenty books. Some have instantly become cult , such as Drum (1996), a one night travelling of dizzying intellect in an Irish pub, you can feel physically, close to these men, to their solitude, to the limit of their despondency. An ordeal? “Several rolls of film, five pints of beer”, he said simply, showing his taste for a temporality long accepted in black and white.
Sometimes, as with Venten pa i gar/Auf gestern warten (Waiting for Yesterday), now exhibited, Krass Clement uses colour, which partially erases the nostalgia that graces his thoughts, while offering a more specific view of a reunited Germany. This mixture of a present past, and vice versa, Is one of the keys to Clement. That which at the same time, allows him to preserve time and to mesure his own desires. From which comes the feeling of power that we can discern particularly in his portraits of women with armored body .
Brigitte Ollier
Krass Clement, Waiting for yesterday
Until 14th January 2017
21 Rue las Cases
75007 Paris
France
http://www.incamera.fr/
