Visual contact in photography lies in the tactile experience of the medium. Michael Snow is an artist who constantly explores the relationships between things and their representation. Most of his work affirms the materiality of the image by situating the image in the space of sculpture, and his overall approach considers how the viewer will receive the image through the mediums and surfaces that are used. He seeks to reveal the transformations that occur when the subject is represented. ("I am not 'a photographer,'" he declared recently, "I'm an artist who uses photography.") 1 Snow's work matured in the 1960s, when many artists were exploring the relationships among painting, sculpture, photography, theater, dance, and film. They were challenging the modernist position that the viewer should be in front of the work. Snow constantly links the physical experience of a place and the fictional experience of his photographs and films, asserting that his photographs, films, and sculptures "present their physical reality and their illusory reality." 2 The artist involves the viewer in devices that blur the iconic and material aspects of plastic elements. He fills his work with paradoxes related to photographic presence-absence and plays on the verisimilitude of illusion. Although he does "work in each medium with a certain 'purity,' a certain integrity ," Snow exploits the space between images through the transparency of various mediums. 3 Using subterfuge, he goes beyond the haptic dimension of vision; his work stands between seeing and touching. With Snow, you have to touch in order to see.
Le contact visuel avec une photographie s’accompagne de l’épreuve tactile de son support, et Michael Snow interroge sans cesse les relations entre les choses et leur représentation. Dans la plupart de ses œuvres, il affirme la matérialité de l’image en installant celle-ci dans l'espace de la sculpture, et sa démarche consiste globalement à réfléchir sur les modalités de sa réception par le spectateur, en fonction des médiums et des subjectiles utilisés. Il cherche à mettre en évidence les transformations qui interviennent entre le sujet et sa représentation.
Bien qu'il “travaille dans chaque médium avec une certaine "pureté", une certaine intégrité”, Snow exploite l’entre-images par la transparence sur des supports variés. Usant de subterfuges, il n’exploite pas seulement la dimension haptique de la vision, car ses œuvres se situent dans un entre-deux du regard et du toucher. Ce double contact est fondé sur la transparence d'écrans, sur une conception sédimentaire de la durée et sur divers processus de superpositions.