In his expansive, nocturnal photographs, Touhami Ennadre maps the uneasy dialectic between the living and the dead, a relationship that is forever circulating through (and informing) consciousness itself. His imposing, jet-back pictures function as modern-day emblems for the violence found at the core of human existence. They stand in silent testimony to the ravages of time that exhaust the aging body, the corporeal rupture that constitutes birth, the willful acts of savagery that deplete whole populations, the perpetual layering of the ages that physically chronicles the natural world. Ennadre’s penetrating vision betrays a collective cultural ‘guilt’; it quietly reveals the brutality underlying all forms of being. The work, however, is not moralistic in the conventional sense. Scenes of childbirth and slaughter, for instance, are presented as equivalents; the same black luminescence pervades and defines images of both themes. The immense scale of Ennadre’s photographs - not quite life-size, but emulative of it - endows each of his subjects with a similar feeling of gravity and profundity. The lustrous black tonality of the entire oeuvre lends an elegance to even the most sombre of pictures. Ennadre’s aesthetic strategy is not one of reduction, however. Rather, he takes a consistent conceptual approach, from picture to picture and theme to theme, in order to underscore the subtle equation between life and death that informs the very essence of his oeuvre.

There is a meticulous typology in Ennadre’s work. He photographs exclusively in series classified by subject or concept, though the number of pictures in one series may differ from that of another. This approach bespeaks his need to methodically record the variations of a single theme. When viewed collectively (as an archive) Ennadre’s photographs chart ontological territories: birth, age, time, remembrance, suffering, death. Even a partial listing of Ennadre’s different series conveys the depth and scope of his research and the existential tenor of his project. In 1982, for instance, he photographed deliveries in a maternity ward at the Hotel-Dieu hospital in Paris, capturing on film the moment of birth - a beginning that undeniably marks the initiation of aging. This series was followed by one devoted to the documentation of slaughterhouses in Stockholm, Munich, and Marrakech from 1983 to 1985. These are not architectural photographs, but rather excruciatingly close-up views of animal carcasses destined to be meat. The clusters of truncated animal parts and flayed cross-sections of animal flesh appear almost abstract, like sculptural studies in black and white. Yet, in their unsparing portrayal of carnage and their spectral silence, these images render death incarnate. Similarly, photographs of sea creatures pulled from their natural environment in the series ‘Fish and Octopuses’ 1992-3, rehearse the theme of annihilation. Piles of just-caught fish, intertwined and still writhing, are pictured in the process of asphyxiation. In the larger context of Ennadre’s typology, this series can also be interpreted as an allusion to the circular nature of life; after all, genesis of all forms of life, including our own, occurred within the ocean depths.

Another series created in 1992 brought Ennadre to Poland, where he documented the haunted remains of Auschwitz. Again focusing on the specific detail rather than the totality of a given situation, he photographed suitcases confiscated from death camp prisoners, which were inscribed with dates, numerical codes, and ethnic labels: ‘Juden’, ‘Pollak’ etc. Neither editorial commentary nor accompanying captions are necessary; Ennadre’s clarity of vision and economy of formal means alone invoke the chilling realisation that this luggage had once belonged to specific individuals and that it had reached its final destination. These photographs attest to the power of the mundane to reinforce the profound horror associated with the Holocaust and, for that matter, any act of genocide.

For Ennadre, photographic ‘technique is not important, it’s at most a means’. Having had no formal training in photography, he developed a highly original working method, one which obscures as much of the subject as it reveals, a strategy that stresses the optical process as much as it does the object of vision. Ennadre uses a Hasselblad camera, to which he attaches two electric torches (one on the top and one on the bottom edge), the lights from which converge at a point halfway between the centre of the subject and the camera lens itself. His goal in employing this unusual form of illumination is to control or banish any unwanted shadows in the resulting picture. Subjects are photographed with a wide-angle lens at extremely close range, thus ridding the image of any illusion of depth. The resulting spatial distortions and calculated flattening of the picture are corrected during the printing and enlargement process, when Ennadre manipulates test proofs, adding relief and light at various stages. At this point he also also masks out all background information, relegating everything but the most central, iconic image to utter blackness. The effect is comparable to a silhouette in reverse: peripheral details are obliterated by darkness, while the isolated subject seems to loom from the shadows, illuminated by some unknown, internal source.

The silhouette-like quality of Ennadre’s images has a provocative etymological resonance that suggests a deeper reading of his project. The derivation of the English usage of the word ‘silhouette’ is from the French term ‘portrait à la silhouette’, which in turn is from ‘silhouette’ meaning ‘(an) object intentionally marred or made incomplete, something of ephemeral value’. This reference to the transitory (made to define a form of representation) further accentuates the allusions to death in Ennadre’s art and their correspondence to the photographic act itself. It has long been established that photography, as an aesthetic practice or a form of documentation, has connotations extending well beyond the biographical, the factual, or the creative. An instantaneous seizing of a subject from the empirical world and the subsequent isolation of it in a separate realm defined by stasis and silence, photography, in all its forms, is inextricably linked with death. As Susan Sontag observes:
All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it all, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Such an observation has been most poignantly articulated in Roland Barthes’s meditation on photography Camera Lucida. For Barthes, ‘the return of the dead’ endures in every photograph, each of which is an irreversible reminder that whatever was documented by the camera no longer exists in the state depicted; the moment rendered is forever lost, save for a fading two-dimensional image. In this way, the photograph coldly and cruelly records what has already been lost to time, while simultaneously capturing what will, eventually, be lost again - in death.

Touhami Ennadre’s fixation on mortality (particularly as it is manifest in the photographic process) parallels that of Barthes, whose musings on the relationship between photography and death were prompted by a childhood snapshot of his dead mother. Ennadre’s earliest experiments with a camera, in the mid-1970s in Paris, date from the time of his mother’s death (his family having emigrated from Morocco ten years earlier). Upon learning of her fatal illness, Ennadre’s impulse was to document her fleeting presence, to inscribe her memory photographically. For Ennadre, the death of his mother became inextricably linked to his pursuit of photography and his poetic use of the medium. As he explains:
I’ve always been escorted by my past, my solitude, 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.

Ennadre’s first exhibited series ‘The Hands, the Back, the Feet’ 1978-82, evolved out of the pictures he took at his mother’s funeral in Casablanca. Rather than photographing the faces of his relatives and friends to capture expressions of bereavement, he focused his camera on their hands, the gestures of which communicated their grief in the most succinct and candid manner. Using this synecdochical formula during subsequent travels in Asia, Ennadre photographed, at very close range, the hands, feet, and backs of individuals whose aged, weathered skin recounts a multitude of personal sagas. Palimpset-like, the wrinkled and contorted bodies disclose the burdens and joys of a life fully lived. Though anonymous (all that we see are lone extremities floating forward from the shadows) these corporeal fragments bear the vestiges of years forever lost; they testify to what has been.

The physical trace, as a sign for what has previously transpired, as a record of things past, reverberates throughout Ennadre’s work. In many ways, the theoretical implications of the ‘trace’ constitute the very core of his photographic project. As a form of visual signification, photography can be comprehended in semiotic terms as part of a larger practice through which meaning is generated and conveyed. Because of its mimetic capabilities - its ability to render a seeming likeness of the perceived world - photography operates in an iconic mode. In other words, the photograph replicates its subject and thus conceptually (re)presents this subject in the subject’s absence. In this context, the medium differs little from figurative painting and sculpture that seeks to simulate reality. But, due to its unique technology, the photograph also functions as an indexical sign.
The ‘indexical’ was defined by the American positivist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce as a process of signification in which the signifier is bound to the referent by an explicit and contiguous connection to the empirical world. An index is, thus, the physical mark or trace of a certain entity or event, which, in turn, becomes the sign for that entity or event. The index can take many visible forms; scars for a wound; lightning for a storm; footprints for one’s passage; and cast shadows for one’s presence, to name only a few and various instances.
Within the photographic model, the trace of the visible world is physically imprinted by light as it interacts with chemicals on photosensitive paper. The photograph, therefore, is an imprint of an empirical object or event that focuses attention on what once was, but no longer is. The notion of the indexical, as a sign that represents a world that can only be rendered in the past tense, is everpresent in Ennadre’s art. His photographs, which are by nature indexical, actually provide examples of the index and its relationship to the past, to loss, and to memory. A 1990 series depicting the cave paintings of Lascaux, for example, intersects with the indexical in a subtle but compelling way. Among the assorted renderings of prehistoric animals on the cavern walls can be found the impressions of human hands that signify, through absolute physical contiguity, the presence of an ‘author’ at the very birth of art.

In the series ‘ The Exhumed Dead if Vesuvius’ 1985-90, Ennadre engages the indexical to represent death at its most sudden and ruthless. During archeological excavations in and around Pompeii, he photographed the bodies of victims who had been covered by volcanic ash and cinders when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. Forever frozen in positions of terror, these petrified figures physically reference the moment of their death. They have become indexes of their own execution. Ever intrigued by that fragile border separating life from death, Ennadre, in 1991, made a series entitled ‘Palentological Vestiges’ in which he photographed fossilised remains of ancient creatures. The artist again invokes the indexical (in this case, primordial imprints of once living things) to signify absence. The effect of such work is far from melancholy, however. Ennadre’s photographs portray the index in its various forms to extol the transitory, to acknowledge the power of time, and to demystify that irreversible passage between life and death as we know it.

Nancy SPECTOR
Copyright © 1995 Nancy Spector.