The material of Marcel Bascoulard's (1913-1978) photographs is made up of dissociated elements: fictitious elements, facts of desires, active elements made of scenes. Immobile, complex, the formal elements fold down to create a story like no other. The perpetual slide between Bascoulard's face and body on the small photographic prints confronts us with a voluntary, astonishing, intense and acute experience. As if his body crossed a threshold by becoming a woman. (…)

This identity disorder gives him the need to invent himself and places him in the category outside of classification, the one of art brut. If his drawings of the city, of maps and of the locomotives he fetishizes, are very orderly and precise, they are empty of characters. The only character that exists is relayed on the photographic side in transvestite self-portraits. He finds himself beautiful as a woman. He draws the patterns of his dresses, he has assigned seamstresses to make them and a photographer who lends him cameras, and also photographs him in calculated postures in rubble.

These are not stolen pictures. The postures are thoughtful, in unhealthy places, alleys, backyards and exchanged for drawings. He stars at the camera. His gaze is direct. His gestures take up the feminine codes: how she carries a handbag (...). He is often photographed with a broken mirror between his fingers. The ruins, the remains of a specular fetish in the hand. (…)

Extract from Diane Watteau's text, "Bascoulard, Molinier, Journiac. The crossing of genres," p108-112.