Patrick Taberna — Ce qu’il nous reste
Exhibition from 7 November to 24 December 2026
Opening
Saturday 7 November 2026
5.00 pm — 7.00 pm
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Camera Obscura Gallery
268 Boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris
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Gallery opening hours
Tuesday — Friday: 12 noon — 7 pm
Saturday: 11 am — 7 pm
Sunday and Monday: closed
Memory has always been a central question in my photography. Memory is made of defining moments, but also of ordinary instants: places, gestures, faces, light and sensations that, without our knowing why, remain with us for a while. This fragile, uncertain material lies at the heart of my work. The square color photographs continue my earlier series. They are close to everyday life, to the familiar pictures one might find much later in a box or an album. They show loved ones, landscapes, interiors and sometimes the smallest moments, without any apparent hierarchy. What matters is less what they depict than what they bring back: a presence, a light, a sensation, something that was bonce there.
But photography cannot quite save anything. Over time, memories change, grow indistinct, fragment and sometimes disappear. What remains of what we have lived when memory itself
begins to fade? To explore this disappearance, I gradually introduced black-and-white photographs into my work, made with a rudimentary camera that deliberately reduces the act of photography to very little.
Color vanishes. Points of reference become less certain. Figures, landscapes, interiors and objects seem to inhabit the same uncertain space, between appearance and erasure. The images also bear the accidents of their making: vignetting, light leaks, blur and imprecision. They no longer seek to
reconstruct a memory faithfully. Rather, they give it a possible form as it comes apart: fragmentary, unstable, incomplete.
Photography no longer stops time or preserves what has been intact. It stages its inevitable disappearance and tries to hold on, for one moment more, to a few traces.
To keep photographing, in the time I have left, so as not to forget.
Patrick Taberna
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