"Works of art are born of those who confront danger, who go to the limit of an experience, to a point beyond which no human can go. The farther one ventures, the more distinctive, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes."

Rainer Maria Rilke

A shattering light. And a background darkness that's definitive. Birth, death, straight in the eyes now. Nerves, head and body. Remember: life. Violence is always despicable.

On seeing Touhami Ennadre's work for the first time, you will be sure to experience strong feelings. You will not remain indifferent, reserved, calm. Either you will flee, refusing to contemplate your image and the world, or you will be rooted to the spot, paralyzed yet forced to react when faced with the tragic side of existence. The shock that moves you is not that of an evil eye. It is not complacent about suffering, but labours to set you free. Its cathartic aim is quite simply shattering.

The most striking thing about Ennadre's work is its plastic unity, the necessity that runs through it. He starts out, he says, from the principle that "you must give. You must be truly true. It's heart-rending. It brings to the surface all kinds of things you're not familiar with. It's either that or nothing." He tries to find out "what's really real": "Light is what's really real, it's the only thing that obsesses me." He also claims not to know "what photography is". "I'm not a photographer. Technique isn't important, at most it's a means." The important thing lies elsewhere: to ward off "violence, misery and death". As is often the case when artists try to summarize what is at stake in their art, Ennadre's remarks are somewhat halting and contradictory, misleadingly so. To prevent the reader falling into a trap, therefore, we must show a little patience in unravelling some of the threads that "underlie the work" - threads composed of the artist's dreams and desires, his efforts to succeed, his labours and his life. "Threads that underlie the work": our use of metaphor suggests, perhaps, that we should begin at the beginning, even if everything in the end remains intertwined. Does the work we are examining, at each stage in its development, not seek to recover "first things", to restore the image of a buried past and manifest its presence?

In what universe did Ennadre first open his eyes? For a visual artist, the question is of more than anecdotal interest. Where did he first see light? He was born in Casablanca in Morocco in 1953, in a house in the medina, an old-fashioned working-class district where his mother made rugs. We should imagine, not a Moroccan villa, jealously concealing its patio, fountain and flowers, its pelmet arches or moucharabies from prying eyes, but a tiny house: a few cramped rooms, no windows and a single veiled skylight in a corner. Darkness everywhere, sometimes lit up by a candle, and, as the only sign of light, a modest terrace under the roof, reserved for his mother's loom. His first encounter with light, then, and at the same time with art, was a rug, seen at very close range, the woolen threads crossing back and forth in time with his mother's hands and eyes. She was often pressed for time and would have to finish her work under the light of the stars, shimmering in the night. Ennadre's first plastic emotion, the archetype for his vision, was a maternal image focused on the only chinks of light to be salvaged from the darkness of the house. He has never forgotten that primal image; it still punctuates his sense of time, and, print after print, he tries to resurrect it in all his photographs. Anyone familiar with the vitality of the crafts tradition as it still exists in Morocco to this day will understand that though, as Ennadre says, he never attended "art school, let alone photography school", his sensibility has been shaped by a very ancient culture.

When, as a child, he wanted to leave the private, indoor world of the home, only one possibility was open to him: the streets. Small, swarming streets where you must thread your way, winding in and out, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat, improvising unlikely routes in which the straight line is always the long way round. In thoroughfares like these, everything has to be conquered from one moment to the next. No path is ever marked, and if you lose your way you never get it back. You must adjust your speed, then, to changing circumstances, and when you want to get somewhere or obtain something, draw up a plan of action centred on that goal, take aim, concentrate, seal yourself off from your surroundings and, in a movement as precise as it is rapid, take hold on what you are seeking. One can imagine the fate of children, their desires racked by poverty. How often, and well before the age of reason, Ennadre must have dreamed of stealing an orange: spotting it, seeing only the one that was within reach, blacking out the rest of the pile which must be sure not to collapse, surveying the watchful eyes of adults, making straight for the goal, quickly grabbing it on the sly, then taking shelter in the dark protective shadow of the mosque or his home, like a thief. Pure fiction, of course, which he makes up for today - at your expense and for your pleasure - with his Hasselblad.

Seeing an artist's work simply as the manifestation of its author's biography is the result of a grossly reductive aesthetic; it is nonetheless important to point up some of the high points of that life, for they inform the genesis and development of a creative force. With this in mind, we have just conjured up Ennadre's private background and early habits of mind, as well as the cognitive style and culture in which they are rooted. But since it is the work alone that interests us, let us abandon Ennadre's childhood and turn to the moment when he first held a camera in his hands. It was in Paris in 1975. His father, a butcher from the heart of the medina, had come seeking work at a foundry in the Paris suburbs, where he would later go blind. Ennadre, who "had never seen snow", was only seven when the great voyage took place, uprooting and transplanting him, and making him, much later, an inhabitant of Paris and, in 1986, a French citizen. He knew only the Arab spoken in the medina, so a French school taught him, as best it could, to write French. Immigrating into another language in this way involved many labour pains and was carried out on the margins of society. How, in a situation such as this, with the eclipse of one's mother tongue and the difficult birth of a second language, can one adequately express the effects of violence occasioned by one's new life, characteristic of an entire generation of North Africans? Ennadre did what they all did: he "slaved away", putting all his strength and hopes into soccer. If Ennadre himself is to be believed, it was practising this sport which gave him his real education in street-life and fighting; he saw it as the only way of escaping, of being among friends and drawing up an offensive strategy that would arm him against the violence of life. Football, which he had been playing ever since the medina in Casablanca, "taught him everything", in particular a way of looking at things that he would later make use of in photography. He only shoots, only activates his camera - dribbling first, feigning if need be - when the moment is right, so that one only really sees the goal once the ball is in the net. As it turns out, Ennadre has not become a professional footballer, much to his regret: he only takes photographs to fulfill his teenage dream. This hiccup in his career is cause, surely, for celebration!

At the same time, things were going from bad to worse, and his mother, after presenting him with an electric organ which he had to give up because it woke his father up, thought of buying him a camera. Why? To keep her son busy, to keep him out of harm's way, to channel his energies, certainly.

But something more profound had occured, for nothing at the time destined him for photography, not the slightest conscious desire. His mother, it must be said, had just begun showing the first symptoms of the illness that would kill her. "Is there a desire to pass life on", wonders Ennadre, "in someone who knows they're going to die?" By way of response, let us note that he used his first camera to take photographs of his mother and her friends. This woman, though only aware of it in mysterious ways, forever after associated her agony and dying with her son's first photographic endeavours. The death he had just experienced inwardly for the first time, this death that "engulfed" and "shattered" him, "toppling [him] into solitude", became his twin sister, his accomplice in the birth of photography. Today, he still remembers this every time he approaches a camera, a negative or a sheet of photographic paper: "I've always been escorted by my past, my loneliness and what I've lived through. It's idiotic, but I can never talk about my work without talking about my mother, because I come from someone. I was a witness to her life, and my work is simply a kind of witness to this person I once knew. Obviously, you can't understand that; it's like my work, you really have to live with it. People want to understand what I'm doing immediately, but you can't enter into my work immediately. It took me years to do it myself."

Photographs of the family circle, brief images of the suburbs: Moroccans, Portuguese, Yugoslavians slitting the throats of pigs. The first outside photograph he took was in London: a tramp with his bottle, trying to catch a pigeon, like Ennadre trying to capture his image with his lens, coming as close as possible. An on-the-job apprenticeship, with no teachers and no technical training. Trial and error, improvisation, pottering about: we can assume that he knew nothing, and still knows nothing probably, of the basic notions of photography set out in a manual for beginners. No matter! He put them all together in his own way, out of necessity and circumstance. He forged, not a technique, which would have to be something you could pass on, but a personal approach formed from one failure after another, unintentional misfocusings, botched negatives and disastrous prints that he would throw away or lose.

Remote from theoretical notions and the traditional rules of photography, he created a protocol that is part and parcel of his vision and ruled by his one "obsession", light. I know of only one photography "teacher" as far as Ennadre is concerned. The lesson was unique and lasted less than three seconds. Nevertheless, he owes a great deal to that teacher. Let us call him the "teacher despite himself", or the "teacher who broke in". One day, while developing some still-born negatives in a makeshift lab, someone - he doesn't know who - opened the door by mistake and apologized. Light entered, blackening the paper. Ennadre had just been introduced to light in photography, his own. He would never forget. And work to be done again with no regard for convention and prejudice.

Between these first faltering endeavours and the departure for Asia that would result in his first exhibited work, Hands, back, feet, two voyages deserve a moment's pause. The first was Casablanca, where he went to bury his mother. He wanted to photograph the agony of separation, the boundless pain he felt watching his aunt hugging one of his sisters. He "couldn't" - nor, I would add, did he wish nor need to - "photograph their faces": he photographed his aunt's hands "at very close range", hands which in themselves embodied all the weight of the family's pain.

Next came a detour to New York. In the house where he was staying he had access to a large library specialized in the history of photography. He looked at everything, rapidly and in no particular order, and realized that he should continue - or, rather, decided he should begin - taking photography seriously as a "medium". He marvelled at the pioneers who worked with very large plates and negatives and established a new relationship to light, but came to feel that the history of photography was not for him. The studio portrait, the cosy family scene, the social survey, soft-focus photography, landscapes, all forms of photo-journalism and documentary, fashion, postcard and art photography, photo-montage, the "chic-shock" clichés of advertising and the rest, the great tradition of the snapshot - none of these things really meant anything to him. Reason enough for him to prefer not to talk about it and - elsewhere, somewhere apart, in his own particular way - stick to his own path. Explaining why Ennadre feels no great affinities with the heroes of contemporary photography is of little interest for anyone trying to understand the particular logic of his work. Once he is more familiar with it, the reader will come to understand for himself why Ennadre does not see himself as a photographer, seeking instead, he tells us, what "cannot be photographed". To avoid talking at cross-purposes or arguing about schools, let us confront the images themselves and the process of creation that underlies them as threads underlie the beauty of a rug.

Shooting, developing, selecting contact-plates, analyzing working proofs and printing in large formats constitute one and the same act, which must be understood as a whole. Ennadre performs each of these operations himself, integrating them in an overall approach that confers a unity upon them. "In the beginning was action", says Faust. Ennadre explains: "My eye takes priority over the viewfinder. The viewfinder is like a keyhole: you can see what the others are doing, but you're not in the action. To be in the action, I took the viewfinder off my Hasselblad".

Removing the viewfinder brought him a twofold freedom: that of the eyes, which focus directly on the area to be reflected on the negative, and that of the hands, which adjust the lens in directions variable up to infinity in order to decide the best angle. The camera is put in its place, that of an eye that follows the movements of the photographer's hands in pursuit of the figure he is seeking, abandoning itself to a kind of ritual dance around and, as it were, within the scene in question, in search of that "clear, focused moment" when the lens approaches the subject "at very close range" and the shutter is released. "Objects in relief viewed at close range, through a single eye, will produce the effect of a perfect picture", wrote Leonardo da Vinci. With a camera you need to have "a viewfinder in your head", to be "your own rangefinder", and to have an intuitive knowledge of framing that only comes after years of trial and error.

This technical bias suggests that Ennadre's forging of a personal photographic style is linked to his use of a lens with a constant focal length: a wide-angle lens, exclusively; and used, moreover, at extremely close quarters. A wide-angle lens, not to enlarge the field of vision, but in order to "come in close". Enough to make the purists shudder. Using a type of focal length designed for architecture in a contrary and unnatural manner allows Ennadre to create his image and, at this stage of his labours, to considerably flatten out effects of depth and perspective. This is only possible because a photograph, when treated in this way, will attain its definitive state only during enlargement, at which point Ennadre, as we shall see, himself imposes relief and light. A wide-angle lens, on account of the direction given to the centre line of sight, introduces a slight distortion which, when controlled, helps form the negative image. It is hard to see how such a method of shooting would allow one to establish the traditional measures and settings: life is too short to waste time changing lenses and turning rings. In order to remain in focus, then, the camera is permanently immobilized at maximum speed and middle stop. But, one might object, how is one to ensure there is enough light in all circumstances? Ennadre responds by fitting out his camera, on top and bottom, with two electric torches whose light converges at the intersection of the centre of the subject and the lens's centre line of sight. Day or night, he works with his own light, which is always the same and is necessarily gov-erned by the position of the lens. This allows him to obliterate shadows, the centre line of sight being perpendicular to the subject; or, alternatively, to turn them to his own advantage by deliberately accentuating them, playing on the position that the luminous eye, the camera, occupies in space.

When developing his films, Ennadre takes into account the circumstances under which the shots were taken, so that he ends up with films and contact-plates whose format (6x6 cm) is too small for the next stage of his work. Having first made a selection, then, he prints a series of working proofs (24 x 30 cm) which he analyzes and evaluates before making a further selection. These are not finished works, merely flat prints on paper with no relief and no real light, in which the effect of perspective has been suppressed - rough copies, sketches, embryonic forms of works which have not yet come to light. On examination most of these proofs will be abandoned; the choice is draconian. At this stage, Ennadre will sometimes arrange his images in pairs or triptychs. It is now, for the elect, that the great labour begins. Once again, he distances himself from traditional photography: whereas any conscientious lab assistant, provided he follows the instructions he has been given, can make a print, in Ennadre's work time intervenes forcefully between the different operations, above all during enlargement. This time factor has more in common with that of the plastic arts than with the instantaneous time of photography.

But let us return to the negative Ennadre has selected. It takes the form of a potential work that has not yet been actualized; what it lacks is light. It is a kind of virtual image from which the eye and hand of the artist will help deliver the image proper. Here, Ennadre's manner is a child of those Renaissance painters who sought to determine the outline of a figure, its "silhouette", its "composition" and, finally, the "reception of light", according to the terms used by Alberti in his De Pictura (1435). The first act is to draw the figure's outline at the centre of the image with the aid of a mask designed to black out anything that is not strictly essential. "I'm a painter in the dark", says Ennadre, whose palette is rich with the blacks he uses to define the subject and structure the imaqe with lines and surfaces. Black is the "other", the place occupied by the other, your place and mine: it allows our vision to get its bearings, to appreciate variations in density between different shades of gray and white. There is nothing funereal about it. It acts like a form of lighting that provides relief and contour, the desired depth, thanks to a skilful counterpoint of light and dark that is reminiscent at times of Caravaggio in painting and Murnau or Dreyer in cinema. The composition, meanwhile, establishes tonal harmony: it determines the exact dose of white - "that extreme flash of light" (Alberti) – along with the black and different grays that will be projected, stroke by stroke, onto surfaces defined by a subtle play of masks, and thus the quantity of light. It is at this point that the hesitant waltz of masks begins, each having its own specific duration of light, its own position, form and movement, as it is superimposed and moved about on the paper and in space. This deliberate conjuring trick lasts for hours, for days on end, and results in a large-format print (130 x 160 cm) or "viewing copy", analysis of which will enable Ennadre to correct any final imperfections (only visible in this format) before moving on to the next prints.

But let us return to the house where Ennadre was born, where light, remember, came from on high to illuminate the darkness; for it is here that he today has his laboratory, his cave of making. In it he acts like a designer, composer and sculptor of light, inventing new practices that will allow him to pin down in his images intensities of light that have become exposure times. Darken here, blacken or clarify there, whiten, shade, design masks, lines and surfaces, arrange transitions, and so forth. These different operations make each print unique; the rest, though bearing a family resemblance to their model, will retain their difference and their own identity. The photographs one sees here and there in small formats are merely reproductions, like those made of paintings.

In trying to give a picture of Ennadre's technique, we have limited ourself to areas that help clarify his manner, style and poetics. When speaking of his work, he calls it his "job", experiencing it as a physical and spiritual activity, the only one he has ever really kept to in his life. Neither pleasure nor recreation, his job, without ever losing the unity of the initial project, nevertheless has periods.

Series? Subjects? Themes would be more appropriate - not in a scholarly sense, but in a more metaphysical, timeless and mythical sense, as when Picasso confided to Malraux that he "didn't believe in subjects, but did believe in themes – providing you express them through emblems. . . ." What he called themes were "birth, pregnancy, suffering, murder, couples, death, rebellion, perhaps kissing. . . . They are much older than civilization."

In chronological order, Ennadre's themes are as follows :

1976 : His mother's funeral, cemetery, first Hands (Casablanca - death)
1978-82 : Hands, back, feet (Asia - the body)
1982-83 : Birth (the Hotel-Dieu in Paris)
1985 : Slaughterhouse (In Stockholm, Munich and Marrakech - violence and death)
1985-90 : Herculaneum (Memory and death)
1987 : Print of the Hanged Man (Paris area - suicide or murder)
1989 : Gravestones and Paving-Stones from the Medina in Fez
1990 : Lascaux (the birth of art)
1991 : Paleontological Traces (Karlsruhe, Messel - the origin)
1991 : Notre-Dame de Paris
1992 : Auschwitz
1992 : The Man in the Ice (South Tyrol, Austria)
1992-93 : Squid and Fish (Al Madrhabath in Arabic, the Straits of Gibraltar - violence and death)
1993-95 : Trance (Benin, Haiti)
1995 : L'Athambra (Spain)
1996 : Ay! mi Toro! (Aries, France)

The reader will already have sensed that Ennadre, when he remarks that every subject he touches "relates to death", is giving us a close-up of the centre of gravity of his work. Death, the heart of his concern, does not mean abolition, emptiness, the end or void; it no more inhabits the crepuscular, the morbid, the macabre or the infernal than it appeals to the Beyond. The religious-minded, whatever their Koran, leave him cold: he thinks of them as conjurers who try to conceal the poverty of their lives, dangerous purveyors of violence and fanaticism. There is no place for the infinite in images which, "taken at very close range", plunge distant perspectives into darkness; nor for the uncanny, because the space with which Ennadre is concerned is that of the tragic. The death at work in his photographs is defined by life, "a set of functions that resist death" according to the physician Bichat, what Ennadre would call "death-life". All that matters is the accord, problematic and tragic, between these two facets of a reality that there can be no question of reproducing, only of "forming", figuring and experiencing. Not death as severance, but death as structuring life, a structured life, "giving birth to life". A life that enjoys a soothing sense of affinity with death, a sense of complicity like that evoked by Mozart in a letter to his father: "As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed over the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling!" In observing that "the West rejects birth and death", Ennadre overlaps with a thouaht of Barthes in La Chambre claire. Notes sur la photographie: "For Death, in a society, has to be somewhere; if it is no longer (or less so) in the religious, it must be elsewhere: perhaps in this image that produces Death by wanting to preserve life. Contemporary with the retreat of rites, Photography might be said to correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of a Death that is asymbolic, outside religion, outside ritual, a sort of abrupt plunge into literal Death. Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a mere trigger mechanism separating the initial pose from the final paper." Even at the time of his mother's funeral, Ennadre's first photographs had nothing gloomy about them: no tears, no coffin, only the resistance of pain in the skin and bones of hands tense with suffering. An affirmation of life in the immanence of its tragic condition. This crucial experience of death would be extended far into space and time: such was the long voyage in Asia and Hands, back, feet. Ennadre's original intention was to "do a work about the body" - the body immersed in life, and on no account the body posing. Where might suitable settings be found for a project of this kind? Asia, its streets and trains teeming with people, seemed to live up to his expectations, especially since the sheer remoteness and material difficulties of the undertaking gave him a sense of distance that helped provide the concentration he needed. It was a question, not of representing suffering like a reporter or indulging in a complacent display of human misery, but of drawing out the figure of suffering itself, the suffering he felt in others and in himself. He made ready, then, for the "true encounters" that would allow him to "figure" the body of that suffering in his pyramid of light. Hands that reach out or intertwine, their lines leaving an impress on time as furrows do on earth. Illuminated fingerprints. Bones and wrinkled skin, in the quick of suffering. Hands snatched from darkness: an enchanted light. Anyone who looks at these hands with eyes as searching as those they turn on us, allowing his attention to focus on the dots – small spaces and lines, white, gray or black - formed by the play of lights, will see that the perspective in question is anything but realistic. Each stroke of light is a sheer product of the artist's will, a reflection. The logic is not one of reproduction or representation, not one of expression even, but of imagination. Where else has one seen the abrupt slope of a spinal column like that in Back of Light, folded like an eroded mountain and violently lit up by a snuffed torch held by an arm with tortured veins that plunges the nearby head into a darkness that, to say the least, is enigmatic? Where, then, is the photo? It has ceased to exist. We are almost faced with an etching, a mezzotint engraving, a Chinese-ink drawing, a painting, I don't know what.

The body bursting into life: in Deliveries at Hotel-Dieu, Ennadre came face to face with birth. Flesh in tension, forceps and skulls taking life by force. A child who has just emerged from its mother's womb, its eyes and fists closed, its mouth open, screams at the world after its first hand-to-hand combat. Another, marked by the darkness of first things, its forms still distended, frolics about in a shimmering chiaroscuro of blood. And because "birth is already death", there is the shattering magic beauty of this little form, already no longer wholly human, couched in eternal sleep, shrouded in the darkness that defines the outline of its body, folded with light, mummified almost, petrified in silence, like a destiny: Moira. Attention should also be paid to those balls of light, those scintillating stars that Ennadre has created for us, discovering them in placentas irrigated by a network of vessels and seething with life like the world itself.

In a different vein, Ennadre has tackled blood and the body, the bruised, slaughtered and dismembered bodies of beasts in the violence of slaughter-houses (Slaughterhouse, 1985): "It's incredible, as though the beasts know they're going to die. They screamed and were electrocuted. Their killers were drinking cans of beer. For them, it was a game. It was madness. Consider the displacement: the beasts were the men, and the humans, the beasts". Meat, the incarnation of violence and death, bursts forth in these images, these carved-up bodies "without organs", as Artaud wrote: "The body is the body It stands alone It has no need of organs The body is never an organism Organisms are the enemies of bodies".

Gilles Deleuze, in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, comments: "The body without organs is an intense body, an intensive body. The Figure is precisely the body without organs. Meat is that state of the body in which flesh and bones merge locally. Meat is not dead flesh, it retains all its sufferings. Bacon does not say 'Pity the beasts', but rather that every man who suffers is meat. Meat is the zone common to both man and beast. The painter is a butcher". Deleuze then cites Bacon himself: "I've always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion. Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal". Deleuze comments: "The man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man. That is the reality of becoming. What revolutionary figure in art, politics, religion, or in anything you like, has not felt that extreme moment when he was no more than a beast, and become, not answerable for the calves who die, but answerable to the calves who die?" This philosophic reading of the work of one of our century's great painters is very close to what we experience with Ennadre's Slaughterhouse; Ennadre, moreover, has produced his self-portrait by projecting the imaginary outline of his face onto a background of meat. It would be stupid to raise the question of resemblance, since it is obvious that, under such circumstances, "the head-meat is the animal-future of man" as it is for Deleuze.

Ennadre's manner is never illustrative, narrative or figurative, but "figural"; "free the Figure", "rescue the Figure from the figurative", these Deleuzian expressions adequately characterize the sense of his approach. Though his images sometimes border on abstraction, they are never anchored in it once and for all, for it is the Figure and the sensation produced by violence that he seeks. "What interests me is what lies behind the subject, birth, death, as a way out of violence. Massacres and barbarity, I've seen them in the slaughterhouses. My light tries to mend this horrible violence, showing the horror of this violence, and not the spectacles of horror it produces". His aim is to recover through memory the violence he has experienced, to close in on violence everywhere he sees it in order to distance us from it and exorcise it by "releasing a feeling of nonviolence". And Deleuze concludes: "The violence of sensation stands opposed to the violence of that which is represented (the sensational, the clichéd). The former is inseparable from its direct action on the nervous system, the levels through which it passes, the domains it traverses: itself a Figure, it has nothing of the nature of a figurative object. As in Artaud, cruelty is not what we think, and depends less and less on what is represented".

The series Herculaneum (1985-90) has the beauty of a resurrection. Ennadre does not photograph the dead, but the precise moment when the archaeologist at last frees them from the lava of the volcano. In the museum they will soon be reduced to neat rows of bones, washed and classified. But at the moment of their discovery it is a memory that emerges; radiant skeletons recall the fear they once entrusted to the earth; they have not moved since the day of their burial almost two thousand years ago. Their reappearance was unimaginable, as though time had come to a standstill, as though death had finally lost the fight. The abolition of history, the eternal return, the triumph, not of death, but of memory. Defying time in this way projects the work into myth, where, in order to explain the mysteries of the world, fabulous images are invented, as here. The fantastic element in myth transfigures this small body, almost a skeleton, half shadow, half shadow-bearer, as it emerges from its tomb, shaken by the rays of a sepulchral sun; in Ennadre's icons, myth spreads the power of its magic everywhere, becoming a cosmos, a universe.

The more mythogenetic the work, the greater its mythological power, the more Ennadre the individual is hidden, the more his presence is obscured: he would like to disappear completely into his work, to dissolve in it, for at that point it would no longer have need of him but exist as self-evidently universal, freed from its progenitor. In achieving this, he would have rediscovered the true status of the artist: not as an overvalued ego, a star, merely as an absent framework, a useless circumstance, a subject in the original sense of "that which is under", at degree zero, that which gives precedence to the form or Figure, the substance and mythological power of the finally existing work whose autonomy resides in its symbolic function alone. This desire to abolish and bury himself in his work is expressed by Ennadre with unusual acuity in Print of the Hanged Man (1987), which he sometimes calls Self-Portrait II: "To arrive at zero-being; to be none of my own doing; to eliminate myself. I'm a hanged man". There is no hint of melodrama here: Ennadre is neither suicidal nor a murderer, merely a hanged man who lives, eats, drinks and works and is condemned to death like the rest of us, but reinterprets his death-sentence every time he prints a negative. In the image, the hanged man is no longer there; all that remains is his imprint on the wall, blurred by time: traces, incrustations, lines, diffuse forms, stretched from top to bottom, from black to white, by the shadow of the rope. Its splendour is that of a sublimated fantasy. This humility, astonishing for a contemporary artist, should not deceive us; it shows that Ennadre is not content with vainglory, but shares in the greatest of ambitions, to live up to art itself, and, above all, to go beyond himself.

In 1989, Ennadre selected one or two Gravestones and Paving Stones from the Medina in Fez. Fez is a town swarming with craftsmen at work and alleys in which the houses are closed, a sunlit hill where the dead watch over the living. The depths of time in a sculpted wooden door, overflowing with history and radiating its own "aura". Gravestones where the Arab calligraphy, so beautiful it leaves you speechless, traces out the secrets of its unmoving message.

Lascaux (1990) led Ennadre to ponder the meaning of intuitively with his eyes. The depth of the shadows, when linked with the clarity of his gaze, denounces the role played by the sacred in these caves. The spells and magic known to be characteristic of the world of the hunt are above all a way of exorcising the death inflicted on the animal. Bataille, the author of Lascaux, or the Birth of Art, is not far off; Bataille, who once wrote in Eroticism: "Lascaux, where a dying bison confronts the man who may have killed him, whom the painter has given the appearance of a dead man. The subject . . . would be murder or expiation".

Ennadre is haunted by a desire to return to the origin and genesis of the human venture, even though, as he knows, any attempt at satisfying that desire is vain. No matter: the tragic is at the heart of his Paleontological Traces (1991), where, remote from any earthly paradise, the traces of the first men emerge in a chaos of bones and trembling earth animated by the luminous spirals of myth: the image dreams. . . .

Like a Renaissance artist, in 1991 Ennadre was commissioned by the French Caisse des Monuments Historique to work on a book on Notre-Dame de Paris. He had never visited the monument and was as ignorant of Catholicism as he was of the Muslim religion. This makes his visual approach all the more striking, as though a kind of cultural unconscious had been at work in him. When Eve offers Adam the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam stands bathed in light, while Eve has been veiled by a touch of shadow from beneath the contact printer: Ennadre, unaware of what he was doing, has made her face almost black. In a painting on the wall, the long pipe of the cleaning lady's hoover might remind one of the spear with which the Roman soldier pierced the side of Christ. In another image, death, reduced to the undulating fabrics in which its skeleton is wrapped, shows only the bones of its hand. Ennadre's imagination confines itself to what he has noticed about the cathedral. He has his own way of framing details, and fixes his vision, piece by piece, using much the same method as butchers use to cut up lamb in the medina. The monument is portioned up into blocks of light and close-ups.

Ennadre went to Auschwitz in 1992. An inner necessity drove him to visit the place where horror and barbarity reached fever pitch, and where, often as not, the treachery of words and images proves unbearable. Under the circumstances, any suggestion of the aesthetic would be enough to give you the shivers. Ennadre looked respectfully at the historical photographs in which memory is enshrined, inscribing on film only his impression of contemporary horror. No general view of the camp and barracks, no montage of images from the time, only close-ups that are like cries: of shoes, saucepans, numbered luggage, the names and origins of Jews referred to in this way. They were remains that Ennadre photographed, living traces that tell us that the extermination will never be forgotten. These everyday objects are the definitive faces of all those who were gassed, and the oven, seen in its true colours, is a denunciation of the premeditation of industrial and organised crime. They are images of remembrance that are non-descriptive, the stuff of absolute evil, at once indelible, accusing and expiatory.

In his pursuit of birth and death, whenever Ennadre is lucky enough to meet some distant ancestor, some elder brother in humanity, he is incapable of resisting. In 1992, on learning that "the ice man", who lived on the earth in the stone age, had just been discovered in South Tyrol, he immediately went to visit him, incorporating him in his gallery of anonymous portraits of stars who have patiently awaited their day of glory, like the dead exhumed at Herculaneum. Ennadre reforms his ancestor, thereby informing us about the being and emptiness of human time. The body with its mummified flesh is lit up by the outstretched arm and the light emanating from the fist: one senses a will that is petrified and definitive, as it were, a kind of challenge thrown up by time immemorial.

In Squid and Fish (1992-93), all the light comes from the bulging eyes of the fish, as though in suffocating they had taken the world's breath away. The thousand tentacular arms of the entwined octopuses are dancing, the graceful and majestic undulations of their whites-grays-blacks the final act of a tragic ballet.

Between 1993 and 1995, Ennadre went to Benin and Haiti to pin down on film another form of extreme transition in which the body all but dissolves, all but implodes or explodes in attempting to escape from the self through dance, ecstacy, delirium or trance. His images of bodies beside themselves now become a moving panorama of spiritual shadows, forms and lights.

At the Alhambra, faced with all the pomp and magnificence, Ennadre shunned the postcard view and limited himself to a choice of quintessential shots. Of door-knockers, for example: you can no longer tell if the hand is made of iron or flesh. Ennadre is not interested in general views, only in details whose shadows and shafts of light focus the spirit, duration, emotional and historical resonance of the place, its beauty and genius.

Ay! mi Toro! You remember the Ennadre photographs called Slaughterhouse. In 1996, he made a variation on the theme after visiting the Féria at Aries. What caught his attention in the bullfight was not the spectacle as such, the passes and the mise-à-mort, but the men's relationship with the mortally wounded bull. Ay! mi Toro! It is no longer the wholesale killing of animals in industrial slaughterhouses, but the quasi-religious carving-up of an animal that has just died in the arena: his flesh, in Ennadre's eyes, carries on fighting; hence a plastic exultation that is particularly accomplished. The beauty, the tension, the madness of the corrida transform the body of the victim into large blocks of meat which continue to elude the butcher's knife. For Ennadre, the last act in a bullfight is performed, dancing, after the mise-à-mort. The realistic aspect of some of the Slaughterhouse series is here given a more formal twist that is at times abstract, lyrical and incantatory. Horns, eyes, flesh and bones merge together to form a visual apotheosis. The degree of accomplishment Ennadre achieves in this work reaches far back in his creative approach.

Leaving the reader to his or her sensations in Ennadre's world of shadows and light, let us consider a moment our own commotion, one we have felt from the very beginning and which has since deepened into the most luminous black, that black light that is the epicentre of Ennadre's work.

It is a powerful aesthetic emotion, a shock, but above all a dynamic reminder overflowing with energy and lucidity. The driving-force behind Ennadre's work is the desire, ceaselessly reaffirmed, to ward off violence, for violence is despicable and unworthy of man. And to do so by creating its opposite, beauty. Remote from any form of morbid celebration, drawing out beauty and substituting it for violence is a political act in the metaphysical sense of that term.

"You walk on the dead, Beauty, and care not what you do", sings Baudelaire's "Hymn to Beauty" in Les Fleurs du mal, which Ennadre interprets lens in hand - not like a telescopic rifle trained on a target to shoot down, but as though he was stroking that part of life that cannot, and must not, be massacred by man: their freedom. In the chaos of inhuman violence, an "I-don't-know-what", a "next to nothing" remains hidden, like a shadow of love; you still have to notice and take hold of it: absolute black is alone capable of clarifying this still, small light that man has no right to extinguish, on pain of becoming more bestial than the wild beasts themselves. It is the overriding importance of this aim that gives Ennadre's project and images their unity. Just as light has a constant speed, everything in Ennadre's work is governed by a constant. We are in the presence, not of themes, but of variations on one and the same theme, death. But to limit oneself to this observation would be either too much or too little.

Ennadre is certainly part of that gigantic tradition which puts death at the heart of every artistic creation. The dance of the Maccabees, the tombs, an entire literature stretching from Montaigne to Bataille (to limit ourselves in history and geography) marks out the terrain: it is man's mortal condition that gives rise to artists. True, but too general: the main thing still remains to be said. Death, then. But which death? How and why? One will have noticed that, beginning with the hands isolated from the rest of the body as a way of expressing pain and the weight of time and death, all Ennadre's photographs after Birth, from Slaughterhouse to Paleontological Traces, have taken as their subject lives, whether animal or human, at the very moment of their death, as was suggested by the title of the exhibition "Live Death". What fascinates Ennadre is the passage, the extreme point, the moment of truth in which death is already there, though only just, and life has that very instant ceased to exist. He does everything he can to eternalize that moment, to extract its quintessence, to approach it, to enshrine its memory, though always with life in mind. "I find death and it brings me back to life". This explains why the mediation of birth was needed to lead Ennadre towards the elusive mystery of death's vital power.

"0 mysterious death", proclaimed Rimbaud, who, with regard to man, asserted in "Sun and Flesh": "Yes, even after death, in the form of pale skeletons He can live, an insult to first beauty!" An assertion of this kind, irreligious in inspiration, forces the poet to create light in darkness. A Season in Hell: "I shall reveal all the mysteries: mysteries religious or natural, death, birth, future, past, cosmogony, void". As in our allusions to this or that painter, we are not indicating a resemblance here, a direct line of descent or identification, but merely suggesting an unconscious affinity, a vibration. In a completely different universe, after removing them from a context of apology that is foreign to Ennadre, who limits himself to the world of immanence, one can hear the echo of Bossuet's words when, speaking before the Grandes Assemblées at the Louvre, he marvelled: "It is a strange weakness of the human spirit that never should death be present to it, thought it is plainly visible on all sides and in a thousand divers forms". There is no need for Ennadre to believe in any sort of divine Providence to rekindle the strength of the human spirit and exorcise its "strange weakness".

The image, then, concentrates all its energies - those of Ennadre, our own - and redirects them towards life: tensions, intensities, tragedy. No artifice, never any lighting from behind, only darkness and light, a counter-death. His world is inhabited by myth, the myth of origin and ends, of revival. The cosmic order demonstrates that indissociability of life and death that only a poetic vision can reveal.

So: is Ennadre a photographer or something else? It is a ludicrous question. He sculpts the light of catastrophes. His logic is that of a plastic artist who would found his work on the Principles of an Aesthetic of Death. He will pierce your eye to the brain in its very flesh.

Unique of its kind, Ennadre's work has a place among the very great. To see it is like listening to Mahlers Kindertotenliecler sung by Kathleen Ferrier.

François AUBRAL
Copyright © 1996 François Aubral All rights reserved.