I weirdly love when I read a Wikipedia entry for an individual, typically a living individual, and encounter a banner at the top of the page that warns me that what I’m reading is likely not accurate. The banner says something like “This article has multiple issues,” or “The neutrality of this article is disputed,” or “This article may contain excessive or inappropriate references to self-published sources.” This is what I encountered when I read the entry for the French photographer Jean Rault.
I've been doing a deep dive on his work, which mostly features poorly lit nudes, and came across his Wikipedia page. I wonder if it’s revealing that I'm more interested in the factuality of his Wikipedia entry than I am in his photographs. I think maybe it does, though I promise I'm not trying to knock his work. It's just that self-mythologizing entertains me. Certain aspects of the entry’s tone make it seem likely that he wrote it himself. There are a curiously high number of times that it mentions that the women featured in his nudes were definitely all over 18. A black and white 1980s portrait of a celebrated writer holding two kittens, a photograph which purportedly put Rault on the map, is described as “famous.” I looked up both the writer and the photograph; the former does exist, and as for the famous portrait… well, let’s just say that if there is anything strikingly original about it, enough so to put a no-name on any kind of map, then I am an expert in ancient Sumerian. (I am not.)
I could be wrong about all of this, but I hope I’m not. I sort of love this for him. Because who doesn’t want to write their own story and have it presented as cold, hard, incontrovertible fact?
-Eugenie Dalland