Marc Riviere

 

Browsing for poetry in the bookshop area of the Marché Dauphine at Saint Ouen today, I chanced upon a small shop which was just being opened up by its owner. He rolled up the metal shutters, then stepped inside and placed a record on a small portable player in the corner, a track by the Doors. Unlike most of the shops I had visited, this shop was dauntingly empty, selling an ecletic mixture of art, books and records. As I hung back outside, the owner gestured me to enter and look around, which I did.

His stock was an interesting mix that included a dadaist text written by Francis Picabia and small books detailing Antonin Artaud's experimentation with peyote in Mexico. Didn't Henri Michaux write a book along similar lines? I asked. Yes, said the bookseller, but he had a doctor on hand in case of problems.

There was also a book by Maurice Lemaître from the 1950s which had a record inside. The owner of the shop offered to play it on his small record player. When he had done so, a sonorous voice issued forth into the glass and iron arcade of the market: overstressed words something like the sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters, a voice repeating words that rhymed: Arnaque, Lac...

Maurice Lemaître was a member of the Lettrist movement in the 1950s, a movement that remains very little known to the English-speaking world, mainly because the works remain almost totally untranslated. The lettrist's idea of poetry was that it should be "purely formal, devoid of all semantic content". Which I take to mean it should be rather difficult to understand as language, more like a kind of music.

As I left the shop I noticed a black and white poster of a woman in a café holding two tea cups over her eyes like goggles. Her shirt was pulled open to reveal her breasts which, in some way, seemed to stand in for her eyes. I rather liked this cheeky photograph and I asked if I could buy a copy. The man smiled: that's my work he said. I am Marc Riviere.

Marc produced a book of his black and white photographs called "Up and Down" with publisher Ipso Facto in 1999. He would approach girls on the streets of Paris and ask them if he could photograph their breasts. He was surprisingly successful, gathering enough candid photographs to fill a book. The results are rather charming, full of a lively intimacy and humanity of a kind which is often absent from nude photography. You can see a number of photographs from the book here.