Quand la ville dort
A series of night photographs manifests an interest in the cinematic potential a photograph possesses and with it an idea of a ‘fictional elsewhere’. Whether transforming what is known and familiar to us into a new mise en scène or discovering new territory, we set out to renew the experience of looking at common places. Our frame is constantly negotiating between architecture and negative space, opening up a dialogue between solid mass and empty space between presence and absence, positive and negative, looking for the dynamic tension a city has to offer.
"An excess of time present in the photographs, carves time 'out of time': a block of time; a duration. This block of time, in turn, summons up certain cinema shots, those situated between the suspension and the continuation of the narrative. Whether in film noir or other drama, the scenes where the camera haunts the city, languishing in the still of the night, distil a sense of elsewhere that nurtures the narrative. They are the pauses without which an atmosphere free of all psychology could not exist.". Yann Beauvais in "Cinema", Street Level Photoworks.
A series of pulp fiction book covers represents the narratives played out in the darkness of empty streets and brooding urban landscapes. They expose a dark vision of urban life, a world of double agents, political tensions and military manoeuvres. Their film noir iconography and photo-realist scenes allude to a former time and another place, another ‘fictional elsewhere’ of tautologies.