Released from its documentary constraints, photography assumes by 2010 its fictional dimension, and becomes a place where stories are told. Strolling, instinct, or poetic intuition take center stage. The most emblematic initiative of the decade is that of the project France(s) Territoire Liquide (France Liquid Territories). Around a nucleus of four photographers, all marked by the legacy of the major government agency commissions (in particular that of the DATAR), a collective takes form and little by little, grows to include some 43 photographers. They travel freely across the country, driven by a common desire to question the physical and conceptual limits of the territory as well as of the practice of photography.
France Liquid Territories claims to be a true laboratory, promoting visual experience and subjective points of view with the aim of capturing a "liquid" territory free from all tension over issues of identity. Their intention, deliberately off-center and emphasizing sensitivity in approach, is to question the plasticity of this territory undergoing perpetual redefintion.
This fluidity can take a touristic turn as with Jérôme Brézillon, or a migratory turn as with Julien Chapsal, while other photographers like Sophie Zénon reaffirm the bonds uniting territory, memory, and construction of self. Yann de Fareins or Albin Millot question directly borderlines and their challenges. All reveal how inhabiting the landscape is fundamentally a mobile and transitive system and the ways of "being in the landscape" are numerous. Other unifying projects, such as "La France vue d'ici" ("France Seen from Here") and the works of many independent photographers presented here express a similar spirit.
In the place attributed to the new representation of the inhabitant, humans shed their status as spectators and acquire the status of actors, of citizens of the image and of the landscape. One cannot help but observe that the practice of landscape photography fragments into as many points of view as there are authors and borrows from other forms of narration, ranging from the testimonial to the biographical or that of science fiction. From this kaleidoscopic depiction emerges a definitively contemporary and prismatic vision of the French territory.
Minot-Gormezano
Messagers du ciel nº 2, 2009-2010
Émilie Vialet
A6 - A10, Massy-Palaiseau (Essonne), 2006
In a period when human activity is understood as more harmful than beneficial to the planet, human presence in the landscape is interpreted as the (re)conquering of a place. Thus, entry into the Anthropocene Era is defined as the inscription of the being in its living environment. This inscription may be in the manner of a scarring, as when Émilie Vialet bypasses piles of concrete and surveys the "wings of the motorway," or of a melding, as when man snuggles up to nature in the work of Paul Minot and Gilbert Gormezano.
Yann de Fareins
Entre Sommières (Gard) et Restinclières (Hérault), 27 avril 2013
Yann de Fareins
Le Col Saint-Pierre, entre Alès (Gard) et Florac (Lozère) par la corniche des Cévennes, 28 août 2011
Yann de Fareins
Entre Dourbies (Gard) et Saint-Jean-du-Bruel (Aveyron), 3 août 2011
Yann de Fareins, observing the borders between French departments, notes that they are present and legible in the asphalt though essentially immaterial.
Beatrix von Conta
Pont sur l’Hyères à Cognin (Savoie), 2012
Beatrix von Conta meditates on the materialization of flow by evoking transport and waterways. In the series "Flux" ("Flow"), she concentrates on capturing a segment of the freight logistics supply chain: a truck overcomes natural obstacles and crosses a river.
Beatrix von Conta
Luc-en-Diois, pont sur la Drôme au Saut de la Drôme, 2011
Ambroise Tézenas
Le Sacré-Cœur, 2013
Ambroise Tézenas
Moulin-Rouge, 2010
Ambroise Tézenas
Opéra Garnier, 2013
At times the French capital becomes a place where the conflict between archetypes and flow crystalizes: hence the work of Ambroise Tézenas shows, with 19th century photography codes, the immutable Paris monuments. Contemporary passers-by appear as fleeting apparitions.
Frédéric Delangle
Port de plaisance de l’Arsenal, Paris, 12e arrondissement, colorisé par Jim John Mathew
Frédéric Delangle
Porte Saint-Denis, Paris, 10e arrondissement, colorisé par Ashesh Josh
In the era of globalization, Frédéric Delangle proposes to transform the must-visit sights of Paris into key areas of acculturation via miscegenation with Indian painting. To do so, he asked Indian artists to color his black and white views of Paris, inserting Indian advertising and graffiti written in Hindi.
Michel Houellebecq
Série « Before Landing », 2012-2014
Seeking to determine what induces identification with a place, the works of some photographers express the tensions between the idea of the local soil where one puts down roots and that of the melting pot where cultures intermingle. The 2014 exhibition Produit France (French Product) thus brought together Michel Houellebecq whose "Before landing" calls into question the museification of the landscape, and Marc Lathuillière whose "Musée national" ("National Museum"), a series of portraits of masked French men and women, plays with stereotypes of representation.
Marc Lathuillière
La Notion de territoire. Raymond Zwingelstein, président, Association du musée du Jouet, Colmar (Haut-Rhin)
Albin Millot
Tripoint frontalier France-Espagne-Andorre (à l’ouest), pic de Médécourbe, commune d’Auzat (Ariège) – 42°36'12.45"N 1°26'33.83"E
Albin Millot
Point extrême sud de la France continentale, puig de Coma Negra, Lamanère (Pyrénées-Orientales) – 42°19'58.84"N 2°31'58.62"E
Albin Millot became interested in the borders of France, which by the year 2010, the time of Europe and of free movement, seem obsolete. To concretize these political traces and experience the country's limits, he went to the ends of France. Observing how difficult they were to perceive, he resorted to the use of luminous reference points to materialize them.
Jean-Philippe Carré-Mattei
Série « Topographie de la disparition. Corse », 2012
It is another end of the world where the familiar landscape disappears and is transformed into something else that Jean Philippe Carré-Mattei unveils for us. Dark photomontages of Corsica depict the world of the Mazzeri, a world where humans adopt the characteristics of animals and where it is possible to penetrate a space forbidden to most. His landscapes reveal a fiction-space by materializing the tales that inhabit them.
Sophie Zénon
Série L’Homme-Paysage, Alexandre, Vosges, 2015
Sophie Zénon invites us to reinterpret the notion of heritage, integrating the human image with the landscape, but also the landscape with the human image in the series "L'Homme-Paysage" ("Man-Landscape"). In search of her roots, she seeks to retrace in these installations, beginning with the example of her father, an Italian child exiled in the Vosges, the history of immigration that has contributed to and enriched French identity.
Laura Henno
Série « Île de la Réunion », 2009-2012
Made during a residency on Reunion Island, this series portrays young migrants and also evokes the history of "marronnage," of the slave fugitives who escaped their owners during the colonial period. Laura Henno created dramatic landscapes where past and present are superimposed and where the extreme tension of the characters in this natural setting refers to a larger geopolitical context.
Julien Chapsal
Série « Calais », 2013
Julien Chapsal, in his series "Calais," is interested in the same human issue, though he takes the radical stance of excluding it from representation. Concentrating on space, he shows us the traces of the passage of humans through this fenced-off, controlled environment, under strict surveillance but continually crossed, occupied, inhabited. The extreme violence of the situation contrasts strangely with the softness of the color tones.
Emmanuelle Blanc
Nº 2, altitude 2 330 m. Le mont de Grange, Haute-Savoie, massif du Chablais, 2011
Emmanuelle Blanc
Nº 6, altitude 1 790 m. Le mont de Grange, Haute-Savoie, massif du Chablais, 2011
Emmanuelle Blanc
Opéra Garnier, 2013
Approaching the Alps via their peaks, Emmanuelle Blanc's "Cartographie d'une extrême occupation humaine" ("Cartography of Human Occupation at its Extremes") requires an attentive eye. Hidden in the sublime and majestic views that give prominence to the geometry of geological strata, the cables, poles and other electricity transmission installations mark the impact of humans on the scene and create a curious balance of power.
Jérôme Brézillon
Série « Paysages français », 2010
Jerome Brézillon's series, "Paysages français" ("French Landscapes"), presents preferred French vacation spots: sea sides, river banks, mountains… a lost Garden of Eden in which humans, tiny points in this immensity, seem at their proper scale. But subtle details suggest, however, a disruption in the equilibrium.
Joffrey Pleignet
PR01 – prélèvement numéro 1
Joffrey Pleignet
PA01 – paysage numéro 1
Joffrey Pleignet
PR01 – prélèvement numéro 1
Roaming through the low mountain landscapes of the Vosges and the Jura, Joffrey Pleignet collects objects and elements of various origins: organic, vegetal, human, industrial… Depending on their form or their nature, these samples can be considered as relics, souvenirs, traces, samples, totems, vanities… Their confrontation with the mountains from which they come suggests the forces at work in the evolution of the landscape are not just human.
Geoffroy de Boismenu
Les Bancs – Saint-Lunaire (Ille-et-Vilaine), 2013
Some photographers allow themselves to step back when confronting a territory now considered as a representation to be surpassed. More circumscribed and personal, their landscapes express an intimate dimension colored by memories or reveal the questions and aspirations of a generation in the making. Geoffroy de Boismenu's "Les Bancs" ("The Benches") for example, is accompanied by a fragment of a meditation on death.
Patrick Messina
Courte échelle 1 – Kerassel. Presqu’île de Rhuys (Morbihan)
Patrick Messina
Courte échelle 2 – Kerver. Presqu’île de Rhuys (Morbihan)
In his series "Courte échelle" ("Short Ladder"), Patrick Messina's two children run and climb everywhere. Inheriting from his father the pain inherent in exile, that of never really feeling at home, the photographer ultimately appropriates a part of the territory thanks to his children's attachment to the Brittany of their holidays. He shares with us the joy and the exuberance of this spontaneous exploration. A great modesty and an infinite tenderness emerge from these images. The territory here serves as a key to reconciliation with the world.
Guillaume Martial
La Chambre photographique
Guillaume Martial
La Silhouette
Strange constructions with unusual uses fill the images of Guillaume Martial where a little character, whom we suppose is the photographer, finds himself in incongruous situations. The fifteen images of the series "Parade" tell us, not without humor, the story of a man trying to appropriate an environment that escapes him, a man who searches in vain for his place in an increasingly complex world, even to the point of absurdity.
Elina Brotherus
L’Étang
Elina Brotherus
La Cure
In direct reference to Romanticism and the paintings of de Caspar David Friedrich, the images of Elina Brotherus show the artist herself, pitted against the elements, experiencing them directly—meeting the power of nature head-on. In an exalted and transcendent nature, she tests the liquidity of her own body and that of the territory.
Thierry Girard
Série « Arcadia revisitée »
"I considered early on that the landscape was not indifferent and that you certainly couldn't reduce it to the simple appearance of what you saw in front of you," confided Thierry Girard. In his series "Arcadia revisitée" ("Arcadia Revisited"), he sets off in search of the genius loci, the spirit of the place, and discovers there the imprint of art shaping the territories.
Pascal Amoyel
Margot, Mezien, 2014
Pascal Amoyel
Barrême, 2014
Making use of the contrasts between mineral, vegetal and human, Pascal Amoyel's series "Levés d'ouest" ("Western Rising") purports to be at once lyrical and documentary and observes how much in harmony the elements can be. The codes of the portrait and landscape genres merge in order to provide a better understanding of the territory crossed.
Florence Chevallier
Série « Éloge de la réalité. Amilly – Loiret – Centre », 2013
Florence Chevallier set off in quest of "singular landscapes and people, characters of the simple life," and returned with an "Éloge de la réalité" ("In Praise of Reality")—"portraits of men and women, children and teen-agers, encountered in the streets, around shopping malls, or on paths leading to the forest… people and places whose hidden beauty I like to render."
Aglaé Bory
Série « Au loin, nos paysages. Colmar – Alsace », 2011
A sense of fragile equilibrium dominates Aglaé Bory's series "Au loin, nos paysages" ("In the Distance, Our Landscapes"). Between France and Germany, between winter and summer, between rural and urban, the house and the high-rise, childhood and adulthood… Returning to Alsace, she highlights a form of uncertainty through her portraits of teenagers contemplating evanescent landscapes.
Cédric Delsaux
A40, Autoroute des Titans. Pays de Gex et alentours, 2012
Cédric Delsaux
Dernière station avant l’autoroute. Pays de Gex et alentours, 2012
Cédric Delsaux
Boucherie. Pays de Gex et alentours, 2013
Cédric Delsaux
La Petite Chaumière. Pays de Gex et alentours, 2013
By means of news items, Cédric Delsaux creates a new photographic narrative.
In "Zone de repli" ("Retreat Zone"), he tries to imagine the world of Jean-Claude Romand, the man who posed for years as a physician before assassinating his entire family. The photographer wanders around the Pays de Gex looking for what this man, who spent his days on the road, could have seen and felt. Through his images one seems to feel the trap closing on him and his lie.
Marion Gambin
Aire d’autoroute, France
In the series "Entre-deux lieux" ("Between Two Places"), Marion Gambin sought to reveal the fictional power of this territory, seemingly uneventful, of asphalt, of the motorway, the epitome of "no-place." Portraits and settings alternate, time seems suspended and a kind of presence-absence, so characteristic of people in transit, emanates from all the characters. The poses and the lighting dramatize these places and imbue them with a strange poetic aura, not without elements borrowed from films noirs.
Arno Gisinger
Série « Konstellation Benjamin » (en collaboration avec Nathalie Raoux), 2005-2009
This series, a collaboration between Arno Gisinger and Nathalie Raoux, is inspired by the career of the German thinker Walter Benjamin and his theories on the loss of the aura of the work of art at the moment of its technical replication. In the form of a palimpsest of time and of space, it mixes excerpts from Benjamin's correspondence crossing France in his flight from Nazi barbarism and photographs taken today of the places he passed through during his exile from Berlin to Portbou. It was in this city of Portbou that, desperate at not having obtained his visa to leave the country, he committed suicide in 1940.
Alexandra Pouzet
Carte du tendre #5. Recyclerie industrielle – Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, 2014
Within La France vue d'ici (France Seen from Here), a project defending the role of documentary photography, is Alexandra Pouzet's series "La Carte du tendre : enquête artistique sur le rapport affectif des habitants à leur(s) territoire(s)" ("A Map of the Tender: artistic survey of the emotional relation between the inhabitants and their territory"). She presents images of a private and personal geography at the intersection of document and conceptual art. In a poetic, off-beat, and, as here, frankly humoristic way, her staging portrays the narratives of the inhabitants of the regions of her childhood that she collects as so many curiously geolocalized mental maps.
Antoine Picard
Tuyau, L’Habitarelle (Gard), 2012
Antoine Picard
Grille, Saint-Jean-de-Védas (Hérault), 2012
It's in examining the infra-ordinary of Georges Perec that "Les Énoncés" ("The Statements") of Antoine Picard reveal to us an art of living, a marginal science of do-it-yourself and of makeshift repair. As an inventory of minute resistance or a listing of disinterested interventions, this series pays homage to a spontaneous ecology confronting a world in precarious balance.
Guillaume Amat
Série « Open Fields », 2012-2013
Proposing a meditation both on the notion of territory as space and on the photographic act itself, Guillaume Amat places mirrors in the center of the landscapes of his series "Open Fields," which reflect the off-camera image. This mise en abyme then makes it possible to perceive simultaneously the setting and its other side, superimposed one on the other in a poetic and sometimes unsettling way.
Alain Bublex
V2 circulaire secteur A23, 2013
The need to make the territory a place for utopian projection opens up perspectives where man and his living space together redefine themselves. That's what Alain Bublex tries to do by using Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin studies, the mad project whose intent was to destroy and then rebuild the center of Paris. This probably would have ended up as a very curious inversion of the center and the outskirts of the capital and the images of it that he proposes—a tangle of motorway access roads lit up by advertising signs—seem right out of science fiction.
Thibault Brunet
Série « Typologie du virtuel », 2014-2016
The narrative on the territory bears witness to the gap that exists between real space and the experience of it. This gap opens two distinct paths that record the strange in the familiar, resulting in the emergence of unexpected worlds: one poetic, the other virtual. It is the latter dimension that interests Thibault Brunet in his "Typologie du virtuel" ("Typology of the Virtual"). Indeed, he explores the French territory using only Google Earth whose views are, without our knowing it, often only the sum of the images sent by the inhabitants themselves. Isolating buildings with a curious precision, he adds the shadows corresponding to the time of their realization and that he compares to a "digital cloud."
Claudia Imbert
All that is solid melts into air, 2013
In all these approaches, the landscape is in metamorphosis and photography is in all its forms: fixed and mobile, sculpture and print, just as water appears to us in a solid, liquid, or gaseous state. Confronted with a territory losing its points of reference, Claudia Imbert's video, All that is solid melts into air, explores the dividing line between still and moving image, and functions as a smoke screen, undoubtedly evoking pollution, but also the evanescence of things.
