PHOTOGRAPHY

"Sans souci, Arizona"

PWP third prize award by Juror Mary Ellen Mark

Group show at .NO Gallery, 251 East Houston Street, NY, NY,USA

May 9th - 27th, Wednesdays through Sundays, 1-6 PM. 

and online gallery on PWP's website, www.pwponline.org

March 1-August 31, 2012.

from "Interstate" series - Film-based photography

I began the “Interstates” series of pictures when I first travelled in the USA in the beginning of the 2000 and it remains work in progress, a travel through space and time, like a never ending road movie.

I’m fascinated by what’s left of the Googie architecture that mixed aerodynamic shapes and flashy colors supposed to attract the drivers’ attention. These are old constructions like gas stations, motels, restaurants, bars or bowling alleys that you can find along american roads, as many remainders of an architectural style that developed in the fifties and sixties, inspired by automobile and space ship aesthetic. Today, a few of those places are left, kept decaying by the desert, but with a visible coat of the past.

I crossed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada (Death Valley) to find them. From the road, I took pictures of architectures and landscapes, often situated near the borders between two states. There is no human presence on the photographs, it seems the places have been abandoned or maybe, invaded by the desert you can sense behind each road, each building.

Travel associated with photography is a way for me to catch this present time, transient between the past with this « déjà vu » feeling that evokes the “on the road again” spirit of the sixties and a future we can imagine as a vast no-man’s land.