OnlythePrecariousTHEPHOTOGRAPHERALAIN.docVIP

Only the Precarious THE PHOTOGRAPHER ALAIN PAIEMENTS MACRO-MICRO JOURNEYS by GARY MICHAEL DAULT Only the Precarious by Gary Michael Dault, Fall 2007, pp. 92-97 Exactitude—it presses upon me like a pestle grinding spices in a mortar. —JAMES COWAN …This is what these images have in common… snatches of a journey and reconstructed objects. Not famous or monumental places. In short, only the precarious. —ALAIN PAIEMENT It was one of Buckminster Fullers poetic and provocative theses that the galvanizing of the world ecology movement, such as it is, essentially happened in 1968—that politically convulsive year of reorientation and regeneration—when we all got our first long, steady, photographic look at our blue planet, hanging in space, isolated, bounded. “I now see the Earth realistically as a sphere and think of it as a spaceship,” wrote Fuller in his 1969 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. “It is big,” he added, “but it is comprehensible.” The iconic photo of the orphaned Earth as a big blue marble was taken by the astronauts of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission. As the astronaut Bill Anders later put it in a documentary about the mission, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”1 I was thinking about NASA’s big blue marble, and about looking down and around—rather than looking across and at—during a recent visit to Montreal to see Alain Paiement. I wanted to catch up with his work, of which I felt I knew too little, and, having written briefly about an exhibition of his soap-bubble and foam images at Toronto’s Leo Kamen Gallery in late 2006 for the Globe and Mail, I particularly wanted to see his even more ambitious, architecturally- scaled bubble-work murals, commissioned by and installed in the biological-sciences building of the Université du Québec à Montréal. In essence, I went to Montreal to practice a different kind of seeing. Spherical thinking, seeing and mapping from above and in the round, has been t