Well, Here. Or a little to the side — because isn’t that where meaning often waits? Not in the center of the frame, not in the thing we look at directly, but in the shadow it casts, in the edge of the image, where something begins to dissolve.

Looking at Bastien Communi’s Well, Here, one feels as though stepping into a space where the act of seeing itself is under quiet examination. These black and white images don’t offer clarity or conclusion — they offer entry points. Openings into a conversation where the words are missing, but their echoes still float in the air. Like walking along a shoreline at dusk, when the familiar world turns foreign, and every shape seems to hesitate between being and vanishing.

Sebald would have lingered here, I think — moving from one picture to the next as one might walk from room to room in a house of memory, not seeking anything particular, but noticing everything. The way light falls on a surface. The way absence holds as much weight as presence. The way an object becomes a story when you give it time to speak. Like Solnit writes in her field guides to getting lost, the questions here are not to be solved but held, carried with care as one carries a fragile thing.

What is a photograph, Communi seems to ask, if not a fragment of the great universal drape of time and space? A square cut from something endless, an arbitrary piece of the world held still — but for what? For whom? He reminds us that fifty years ago, the Pioneer spacecraft carried a metal plate beyond the sun — music, signs, maps of Earth, sent out to no one, or maybe to someone we’ll never know. Photography does the same in a way, doesn’t it? A message sent out, a shard of vision left to float in the dark, waiting for someone, someday, to stop and look.

And what do we see when we stop and look? Is it fact? Is it fiction? A staged moment or a real one? Dillard would say that seeing is an act of creation — that we never see something simply as it is, but always as we are, in that moment, in that body, in that breath. Communi’s work leans into that quiet truth — leaving us on the verge of meaning, on the edge of the verb. He knows that between the documentary and the dream, there is always a blurred line, and that line is where we live.

Well, Here feels like an invitation to stay a little longer in that space. To sit with the image that doesn’t explain itself. To let ourselves fold and unfold with it, like the stars shifting overhead — just slightly different each night, though we barely notice. Maybe that’s the work of art like this: to bring us back to the act of noticing. To remind us that every day, when we open our eyes, we are beginning again. That we wake up new. That we fall from above.

There is something comforting in knowing that there are as many questions as answers in reality — and as many answers as questions in fiction. The point is not to sort them out, but to keep asking, to keep looking, to keep wondering: “Who are we to believe? What can we see? What can we imagine?”

So we look, and we drift, and we carry these fragments with us. Like a small piece of the universe’s fabric, cut just for us to observe — Well, here. Or a little to the side.

Belgian Photobooks