Focus on No man's land

The concept of No Man's Land bears witness to a space "without qualities". These peri-urban territories, between city and county, as Cyrille Weiner's series reminds us, are criss-crossed by commuters but largely uninhabited. They are places reflecting uniformity: resort areas with Patrick Tourneboeuf, residential suburbs with Christoph Sillem, military exercise zones with Guillaume Greff. It's sometimes impossible to identify the place, so similar they are from one country to another, as in the work of Geoffroy Mathieu who mixes views from France, Scotland and Morocco. But by embodying emptiness, these spaces can become the living place of those who have no choice other than to be in transit. It is this destruction of the bond of belonging that is so sharply criticized in the works of Gilles Coulon, Aymeric Fouquez, or Jacqueline Salmon. The cruelest absence remains then that of the human community.

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French Landscapes A Photographic Adventure, 1984 - 2017