The latent image or the expectation of the image

For its 30 years of existence, Stimultania gives carte blanche to its founder, Bob Fleck. Enigmatic, daring, ephemeral, the exhibition The latent image or the expectation of the image gives pride of place to reflections on the contradictory mechanisms of the photographic act.

“Latency waiting for the beauty image of the photographic gesture.
Hidden mirror image.
Opposite, the other gesture ...
and its appearance-disappearance. "
Bob fleck

Bob Fleck, founding member of Stimultania, directly questions the photographic act and its medium. His practice revolves around one action: disappearance. The whole of his production is intimately linked to the trials of his life. Animated by this desire to create, Bob prefers blurry, confused, altered images where only the viewer tends to escape a reality.

The artist reveals to us a work that is still in the process of reflection where the public is invited to enter this unique place that is the workshop. In the Stimultania exhibition space, Bob Fleck invests every piece of wall and every concrete nook.

Self-taught, the character Bob Fleck would certainly be closer to the performer than to the photographer. The creation of Photo Mégot, at 14 rue Sainte-Hélène in 1974 in Strasbourg, transgresses the “normality” of a photo studio by offering an experimental approach to shooting. Bob's career and production are constantly appealing with their plastic and experimental richness.

Bob's photographic act is an experience: that of the world around him, of loved ones and of a territory. "

[Extracts from the room sheet]

Founded in the Alsatian substrate, raised according to the canons of a commercial and Colmarian family then grumpy in the 68s, Bob Fleck is a philosopher and poet. The photo has long covered his multiple peregrinations. Because his intimate vocation - the cinema - certainly lacked support (it's a shame because there is the soul of a Jacques Tati in Bob!), He adopted the School of Architecture of Fine Arts of Strasbourg and its fanfare. Although hard of hearing due to a distant childhood illness, he became a virtuoso clarinetist and has since maintained privileged links with former musicians who have all become eminent architects.

During these student years, the objective gradually replaced the drypoint of sketches, wash and charcoal: his colleagues became his first models and the city - which he plunged into shadow, mystery and pleasure - his first subject. He retains from these studies an immeasurable love of DIY and a marvelous ability to transform material. Thanks to the salary of his first - and last - job as an architect in an agency in the Vallée de Villé, he bought an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic with the Zeiss lens, in the predestined name of Flektogon 2,8x28mm. Equipped with this camera, he left for London and made his first exhibition with the images brought back from this trip in his apartment at Place Saint Nicolas des Ondes. He then devoted himself entirely to his passion - photography - and, more broadly, to all the arts of the image.

A follower of science fiction novels which absurdly denounces the ignominy of a present, he is nostalgic for the lost beauty of the past that he caresses in old objects. Rare specimens of cameras and pictographic devices, rich in the memory of their projected shadows, gradually populate the attics where he established his successive workshops. Projection or reminiscence help the artist, in search of the absolute, to transform reality. Bob puts his talents at the service of regional culture, illustrates brochures on architecture, artistic life in Strasbourg and exhibitions of alternative 12 - and popular art.

Other followers then come to frequent his image laboratory under the roofs and with him created the Stimultania association which will flourish in rue Sainte-Hélène in former industrial buildings and will host numerous artistic and festive events. This urban wasteland is suffering, like many others in the city center, the pangs of real estate speculation; the association is moving. " Some silver lining ". It is on the ground floor of the Maison de l'image, rue Kageneck, that the association finds its place almost naturally, not far from the school of architecture where Bob now trades his experience and advice to students.

Image hunter on the lookout, Bob does not covet prestigious takes so much, but brings out the unprecedented in the banality, transforms into icons of humble faces, captures the aura of a childish profile or the deaf beauty of the street who wakes up in the morning, seizes a celestial fire which lights up beatified workers during a site meeting. As in a funeral ritual, he veils a dear soul in mist, a portrait scent of roses and violets, freezes a face in a mausoleum of ice. Pause. Bob is building up what has already disappeared, leaving to reflect on the meaning of this race lost in advance over time. His photos, like the stars, are visible and radiant images of microcosms or vanished angels. This high-perched artist crisscrosses the space with small, light steps, sowing behind him, in the deep human forest, his little pebbles of light. "

Claire-Marie Brolly, Yaoundé, May 2017