Albert Dadas

Tell me who you haunt…

  Who was — or is — Albert Dadas?
Perhaps an enigmatic traveller, one of the first “dromomaniacs” to be diagnosed at the end of the nineteenth century: in this period of nation states and frontiers, criss-crossed by all sorts of vagabonds, this unassuming employee of the Bordeaux gas company turned his back on himself and was infected with an “ambulatory automatism” which led him, at length or briefly, from Valenciennes to Moscow (via Liège!), from Prague to Warsaw, and from Berlin to Minsk. He was more an adventurous person than an adventurer, who stumbled and picked himself up, who left traces with one hand while erasing them with the other. 

  Who is — or was — Philippe Herbet?
Perhaps a wandering artist, who claims to have been born in Istanbul in 1964. He has been taking lots of photographs, writing a great deal and drawing a little for a long time. He also knows the art of fugue: his perambulations have often taken him to the East (Russia and Belarus) or to the outposts of the Orient (Turkey, Armenia and the Caucasian republics) and have already resulted in voluminous publications containing a free mix of texts and images.

Could it be that these two individuals were really the same person? (and if so, the English moralist would add, which one?)
Herbet-Dadas was a single entity, or, at least, tends to become one. For, in the story of this duo, as in all such stories, who seized whom in the end? Enquiry or delirium, memory and projection, wandering and obsession, personal fiction and timeless documentary, the “Dadas” project has mixed as it goes along, for almost five years now, historical and contemporary photos and texts, tourist guidebooks and spiritual testimonies, signs, moods, reminiscences and dross. Trajectories are mixed up, coincidences increase, as do dazzling flashes and disappearances. 

Philippe Herbet turn his back on himself and on the familiar landscapes where we thought we could find him, sharing an attempt that is not risk-free: somewhere between stripping himself naked and a complete dissolving of himself, an historical as well as a spiritual and psychological quest, a far more internal journey than his previous ones. In their long-exposures, the images he produces are non-self-portraits: “I am his ghost and he is mine; I am in the frame, both his subject and mine.” And if the beauty of women continues to punctuate and attract the photographer’s meandering or static wanderings, it melts before our eyes in faded tapestries, blurred landscapes, already almost-erased photos — white snow, twilight… 

On the other hand, are not self-effacement and freedom of movement (of individuals and peoples) very contemporary problems — or, put another way, as much turned towards the past as the future? 

Who knows? Here are Herbet and Dadas joined together in space and caught up by time and by themselves. 

Emmanuel d’Autreppe, January 2021 
Translation: Chris Bourne

Herbet-Dadas: the book is co-published by Contretype (Brussels) and L’image sans nom (Liège).

ARTICLE:
David Martens, « Des fantômes photosensibles. Philippe Herbet – Albert Dadas », dans L'Exporateur. Carnet de visites, May 2021.

Website: www.herbet.me

© Philippe HERBET, series Albert Dadas, 2015-2019, 30 x 24 cm, Courtesy Galerie Cerami, Charleroi / © Philippe HERBET, series Albert Dadas, 2015-2019, 30 x 24 cm, Courtesy Galerie Cerami, Charleroi / © Philippe HERBET, series Albert Dadas, 2015-2019, 24 x 30 cm, Courtesy Galerie Cerami, Charleroi.