JIM HAYNES

New-York city

John Flattau is a photographer. But I believe that he is more than that: he is truly a poet. He says himself that "photography" does not really describe what he does. There are people, he believes, who take more accomplished landscape, portrait or fashion photographs. He chooses, instead, to use his photographs to express an unconventional language. He wants to use photographs to create a linking of emotions, and to a lesser degree an interconnecting of graphic forms. When you look at a series of his images, there is often not an apparent visual connection. One must look carefully (as one must examine one's feelings before they can be best understood) to perceive what Jean Cocteau called the "inevitable invisibility of a work of art."

The obvious does not always evoke the greatest sensuality: it is often more powerfully expressed through mystery and innuendo. John Flattau wants to speak to us not only of these ideas, but more importantly of a certain quality of emotion that charges these concepts. And like Chinese
calligraphy, it is the beauty that surrounds the brushed line which enablesthe artist to unite sign with feeling.

Anne de Margerie
Éditeur, Réunion des Musées Nationaux,
Paris, France, September 1992

Excerpts from the text for the exhibition
'A selection of photographs from "Swan's Song" 1985-1988 by John Flattau'
from the permanent collection of the international center of photography, New York City.

text ©Anne de Margerie