Jérôme Thirriot


Jérôme Thirriot could well be called a man of light. Light has been a consistent preoccupation throughout his life, from his earliest childhood to the present – as poet, as photographer, as film professional, and more recently as a world traveller with a special devotion to India.

To begin with, he was born in Paris, a city which the whole world has learned to refer to as “the City of Light” (“Ville-Lumière” in French). It was on July 15th, 1955, that he was born there to a family that had been intimately involved in film and movie-theatres for generations. His father, his paternal grandfather, his maternal grandfather and his maternal great-grandfather were all adepts of the cinema world in France.

In fact, his great-grandfather, Ferdinand Jean, had been a man of theatre and a pioneer in the film world who became acquainted with the renowned brothers Lumière (whose family name means “light”), Auguste-Nicolas (1862-1954) and Louis-Jean (1864-1948), the inventors of cinema and of filmmaking technique whose first public demonstration of their “cinématographe” in 1895 is now regarded as the birthday of cinema.

As a child, Jérôme often heard of the illustrious brothers Lumière. He was also told that as a consequence of his great-grandfather’s meeting with these two “men of light”, his ancestor had built one of the first movie-houses in France.

No surprise, then, that Jérôme himself should now be the co-director with his twin brother François of the vast and impressively modern METROPOLIS in Charleville-Mézières, a multiplex movie palace that seats 2,000 spectators in ten different projection halls – and where, in addition, art-lovers in the Ardennes can be treated to frequent exhibits of paintings and art-photos in the theatre’s many windowed and light-filled lobby.

Jérôme studied as a youngster in Neuilly-sur-Seine and in Nanterre, but he later settled in Rimbaud’s Ardennes where he has been living since with his muse-in-residence and professional collaborator, Annie Bissarette. As an adolescent, he had loved Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as the films of Jean Renoir and Satyagit Ray – all of them “men of light” – and he lists high among his favorite writers Ernst Jünger, Knut Hamsun, Henry Miller, and Kenneth White – visionaries and light-bearers, each in his fashion. But a first trip to India in 1977, at the age of 22, was destined to enlarge Jérôme’s spiritual horizons in a dramatic and surprising way. As a boy, he had often had mysterious recurrent dreams about strange, exotic, bearded figures in turban-like headgear who seemed to incarnate an essential kind of wisdom, always in a luminous and distinctive setting which he wasn’t able to place. He was puzzled by these night visitors.

What did they want? What did they mean? Where did they come from? The landscapes of these dreams eventually became oddly “familiar”. In 1977 came the answers. On an impulsive one-way trip to Delhi, the youthful Jérôme met and fell under the spell of a captivating young Hindu dancer. She lost no time in informing him that his destiny was “waiting” for him in Kashmir – just like that! There was something oracular in her tone, something sublime. Jérôme didn’t hesitate. He left immediately for Kashmir and, soon after he arrived in Benares with his urge to study music, he “recognized” the landscape of his childhood dreams! There it was, at last. Quite soon he found himself assiduously studying Hindu classical music under the guidance of the distinguished tabla player, Sri Chhote Lal Misra, who, it appears, had been quietly “awaiting” his arrival at the Music School of the University of Benares.

On subsequent visits to India, it was not only his passion for Hindu music that drove Jérôme but also an earlier interest in photography which revived. The remarkable photos that accompany Jérôme’s poems in this exhibition testify abundantly to the etymological meaning of the word “photography” – from Greek roots which signify “writing with light”. Anyone who scrutinizes these photos attentively will plainly see that between the lenses of Jérôme Thirriot’s camera and the ancient dream-landscapes of old Benares, there is an intricate dance being danced before his or her eyes – the dance of Shiva!

But why Benares? Why indeed is it that Jérôme and Annie seem to be “called” again and again to Benares? Benares is said to be the oldest city in human civilization. Our own Mark Twain called it “twice as old as tradition”!
Jérôme himself says he loves it because it seems to him to be the continuation of a life-long waking dream of his. It seems to be “in time and beyond time (at once)”. It seems to him to be the Past perennially flowing, like the sacred river Ganges, into the Present. In the Hindu religious tradition, Benares is seen to be a mystical rose born of the light of the sun and the waters of Ganges. Each morning, numberless devotees descend to the banks of the Ganges to wash away their sins, to adore the life-giving light of the sun – but also to die and be cremated!


Jérôme is struck by the enigmatic daily encounter here between life and death, between time and eternity, between darkness and light. But there is seemingly no despair here. Hinduism has always seen light as a force that has dominion, ultimately, over darkness. And that is what Jérôme Thirriot seeks to capture in both the faces and the apparently inert objects which he photographs in Benares: the triumph of light. With him, one is almost tempted to consider it a quasi-mystical calling. It came as no surprise to Jérôme the Dream-Beckoned when he learned, well after his first visit to Benares, that Benares was formerly called KASHI, a name which means “shining with divine Light”.

Bertrand MATHIEU
Charleville-Mézières
August 24, 2006.

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