城市 (City)
Book of 33 photographs from eight Chinese cities (2006-08)

edited by 5centsID

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The photographer’s gesture is a sacrifice. When he presses the trigger, the mirror rotates and thus block off the scene vision to his eye. When he eventually looks at the photography, he discovers his sacrifice’s result. His work can therefore be assimilated to a batch of blinking eyes that he achieves when he considers episodes as significant.
Result is a new space delineated by a frame which is the effect of the photographer’s subjectivity in favour of a dramatization of a reality. What is inside this frame, is then an instant theatre for which each imagination writes a play; and what is out-frame becomes an infinite environment that the photographer belongs to. These two worlds even if they are split by the frame, support between them, a prolific interaction for the spectator’s imagination.

Instant belongs to fiction. It has no definitive value. It can be this second’s fraction when a figure and its reflection are joining together thanks to a Parisian puddle; but it can also be this summer night’s eight hours when a famous New Yorker skyscraper was filmed fixedly. Cinema and Photography have this common point to create images which capture this instant inside themselves. Our part, as spectators consists of doing everything to liberate this delicate time dose.

« The City does not exist out of the sum of all points of view which are express it » Gilles Deleuze explains to translate Leibniz’s concept of Monade. This idea, thanks to which, the city is nothing else than the sum of all points of view about the city is illustrating the impossibility and the absurdity that would be represented by a photographic approach which would be wanted as objective. No matter that urban pictures comes from different cities, because their association are creating eventually another different new city for everyone constructed into each imagination. This new city is not situated on any map like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which are nothing else that some kind of pictures from Venice by Marco Polo. However, these pictures owns their own independence into the Great Kublai Khan’s imagination.