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An interview by Andrea de Funes with Eduardo Momeñe

CBA catalogue (an extract)

"Painter Frank Porter shows his portrait of Xoe Trevor to prospective client Mark Brett. 

Mark Brett: It doesn't look anything like Xoe, it's not recognisable. 

Frank Porter: I see... You want to see something more conventional, more photographic". 

The Spaniard's Curse, Ralph Kemplen, 1958

AF. Portraits and other Fictions... That's a good title...

EM. Actually, the portrait is already a re-enactment in itself, a mise-en-scène. It's a strange performance, let's say theatrical. It only lasts a hundredth of a second, your audience is the camera, you act for the camera. In any case, yes, there are other fictions... 

AF. Practically all the photographs are "studio". em Among other possible options, they are an important part of my work over the years. The studio is already in itself a camera obscura, something like a non-place, where any image is possible. It is a space where I isolate myself and the world disappears. I like its silence, I never photograph with music.  I find it curious to note that almost all the photographs, over more than four decades, are taken in the same square metres, an unsettling time machine.

AF. What do you call fiction? 

EM. Let's say I use it as staging. It doesn't go beyond that, I don't think in imaginary worlds where nothing is verifiable, where nothing happened. Everything tends towards a certain suspicion if we look for the real of the world in a photograph, but I'm afraid that the real is to be found elsewhere. Perhaps a certain echo, a certain memory can be perceived; the photograph is only a text. I don't expect the first page of a book of CartierBresson photographs to say: "Photographs based on real events", but a reliable comment would be helpful. We need to be reassured and we need to believe it, because photographs will never tell us what we are seeing, it is an uncertainty not so far removed from the uncertainty that can be produced by the dreaded artificial intelligence (AI). I don't know why photography has been saddled with the sambenito of having to document the truth of the world, of having to take responsibility for it. Truth is too much of a subject, let's stick to our own little uncertain photographic truth, which is already a lot. Staging is a very controlled fiction that, very often, seeks to comment better on the real, to give it a certain meaning; that fiction can provide an extraordinary synthesis for those who seek certain realities. Ralph Gibson spoke in The Open Door1 of a directional documentary filmmaking, which he likens to a cinéma verité / direct cinema. It is interesting because little documentary filmmaking is not staged... and structured. There is no better place for fiction than rigorous documentary filmmaking, and perhaps no better way to approach the real than fiction. In some books you can read invented reality, but the term should also be qualified.

AF. You refer to fiction as a stage on which a performance takes place, including a set? 

EM. Yes, although, in fact, the world that is there is already an excellent stage. The game that photography can play is that it doesn't let us know for sure where there is a stage with actors and where there isn't. We don't have that guarantee. af You've made a comment on the world that's already there. We don't have that guarantee. af You've said that you take photographs in the spirit of a collector, that you're building up a collection of photographs. em Yes, I collect my photographs, and the way to keep expanding the collection is to continue taking photographs; it's not easy to find them out there. François Truffaut said something that I found interesting: he made films because there were some films he wanted to see, and even own, and although he saw very interesting films, there were many that he couldn't find when he went to the cinema. It is difficult to collect images piled up on the computer, but it is not difficult to collect photographs: they are objects and they are collected like any other object. They have the particularity that they are really curious objects. It's a nice collection. 

AF. You chose photography. However, you are very interested in cinema, and not only as a spectator: you have always talked about making films. You could have written a book called The Pleasure of Filming, not just The Pleasure of Photographing 2. 

EM. Photographing is more immediate, more tangible, and therein lies part of its appeal. It is also a different kind of writing. Cinema has always been an unfinished business and I'm afraid it will remain so. It had its moment, but it was complicated to manage, too much dependence if I wanted something of formal quality. It's already too much effort for me to make photographs. In fact, The Pleasure of Photographing, as far as I'm concerned, should have a sequel: The Pleasure of Photography, with which I would even feel more identified. It would be a different book. I made a small film when I was very young, Andante (1974), which had a certain amount of success. I felt that cinema was possible, and in solitude. Of course, you can make an excellent film with few means, there's Ross McElwee; his work interests me a lot. I think that maybe I should have continued with it, but photography fulfils me completely, and in no way have I experienced it as a substitute for cinema. What happens is that, although they are very different languages, my photographic head is very similar to my cinematographic head, and in one medium as in the other I don't think of something to tell, I just want to show certain things, to describe visually [...]