The Really New Photography Of Maurice Lemaître

• To grasp the originality of the photography by Maurice Lemaître, one of the major creators of the Letterist Movement, one must understand the new vision of all arts, according to Letterism.
• The work of art is created :
• 1) first, by some means of realisation : paint brush for painting, body for danse, etc.
• 2) After that, those tools produce an artistic element : music notes, objects which reproduce reality, etc.
• 3) Then those elements are given a rhythmic organization by the artist into styles : the perspective, the dodecaphonism, etc.
• 4) Finally, those elements and their stylistic organizations are adapted to the author' s preoccupations, his subjects, his themes, which are the final objective or the work.
• From this new artistic analysis, one can now easily define the consequences of the letterist style in photography :
• from Niepce, Daguerre to Nadar, photography has developed an expanding classical period of techniques, forms and subjects. And from Carjat, to Man Ray, a romantic phase, of more inwardly, subjective preoccupations.
• However, before letterist photography, there had been no period of deepening in this art, such as those found in painting for example, from Impressionnism to Abstract ; or in poetry, from Baudelaire to Dadaïsm and Surrealism.
• Letterist photography has broken new ground by initiating a new period in this art form, by giving up subjects, too often exploited, and by turning towards the technical material itself to go deeper into it. And
• in the same manner as collage or scratching have sprung out, in painting, from new chemical techniques, various additions of inks, paintings, etc., the letterist photographer reveals a more finely detailed vision of the negative. While subjecting the photo to intensive post-production and sometimes iconoclast, he builds up new surprising images.
• This post-production, by combining the technical means of photography to those of painting, has allowed, from the very beginning, writing with letters and signs ; then some imaginary super-signs stimulating the imagination towards possible or impossible works, perhaps picked up by other senses ; and finally, by going further through the original mean of the open work, some photograph which now enable the positive or negative entrance of the public itself into the photographic work.
• Maurice Lemaître has created numerous works in all dimensions of new photography. Around him, among recent producers of proofs, though highly praised even though they have become very expensive, we see only photographers with easy success, whose inspiration comes too much from photographic romantism, its expressionnist, photogenic, surrealist characteristics, etc.
• This is why we thought to introduce this inventive work essential in photography, and to suggest to you to help us make it better known. As it is still too overshadowed today, this work thus offers to the real amateur of the photographic invention another chance to participate in a new intense fight for an original inventive, really inventive photography.
• Christiane Guymer ("Lettres et Signes", n°7, Février 1998)