Brigitte Grignet

Photographer
 
Here & Now
Location: Liege, Belgium
Nationality: Belgian/American
Biography: Brigitte Grignet is a Belgian photographer focusing in a more personal type of documentary photography. She studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York, where she lived for 15 years. She worked with Mary Ellen Mark... MORE
Public Story
Here & Now
Copyright Brigitte Grignet 2024
Date of Work Jul 2008 - Ongoing
Updated Oct 2018
Topics Black and White, Film, Fine Art, Photography
Within me, I have childhood memories and frozen moments. From evenings spent looking at family albums, these fragments of life remain. I know the anecdotes by heart, and the adventures behind every single picture. The border between the stories my mother used to tell us and those I have created on my own seems to be slipping away. Where are my memories?

I have always been obsessed with the passage of time and I have a futile wish to arrest it. This desire springs from my fear of the temporary, which is an acute insight into life’s precariousness. When I first picked up a camera, my motivation was to write a diary of images so that all of those moments and memories could not escape. During these privileged moments I feel that there is no space for intermediate feelings. I feel alive and I don’t want to forget it. I am here, now, and it will never happen again.

Every day, we witness so many things. It is as if someone is telling us a story with a thousand and one details and never finished. Bits of things speak to us and others get lost, never reaching us. In these moments of acute awareness, the world seems like a new place. Before the mind has analyzed the meaning of the moment, my finger has already intuitively pressed the shutter. The place and time have lost their importance, and the images seem to create their own universe. Even if I feel connected to the outside, to the people around me, it is as if the perception of the world brings us back to our memories and our childhood, to an infinitely intimate place. In the solitude of these moments, the discovery of others and of oneself pushes us to write a story as we have experienced it emotionally, beyond the exoticism of places and moments.
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