The world seen from the construction site
What is the city about? To look at the world? Or to be this world that looks at itself and creates itself by looking at itself?
The building that houses the editorial office of Le Monde, which until recently was under construction, is located next to three new construction sites: a train station, a rainwater evacuation system and a new shopping center. These worlds that are made, that are informed, these imaginary worlds that become our real world. These powers that are embodied by the invented information that, once transmitted and diffused, makes us believe that it is reality, and by this effect bends the reality of others to its fantasy, its imaginary power. Power of the powerful over the weak, under the cover of a good conscience, since those who arrogate the place of the masters make us believe that reality functions with domination: economic, patriarchal, ethnic, political... all these fictions that lock us up, transform the real when they are not.
Reality could be quite different, if we no longer believed in these imposed fictions. In reality, all these constructions are empty and without subject. Without any other subject than an infinite diffraction of powers of two, perpetual and perpetuated of the same unreality, which pretends to be reality. And the digital can come to multiply these dominations, as alpha and omega of the illusion, which becomes our real without us seeing it. Or not, if we decide to free ourselves, to touch our existence, as subjects of ourselves.
Portfolio
Because of the mechanical nature of its technical function, photography is for me a matter of time rather than a visual matter : in its silver salts, or its pixels today, it is time which is captured, preserved, reinvented at every glance. Time of life, time of vision, time of poetry.
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The fold
Series of 80 photographs of light.
Unfolded folds illuminated in the unheard-of night of a gaze that lives again. -
The celestial garden photographed
Series of 60 photographs of a danced garden.
The music of nature, the music of the act of cultivating, the music of our movements, the music of looking at and listening to others... the (…) -
The archipelago of green islands
Series of 45 oceanic photographs.
Satellites out of tune, agreeing to spark the imagination. -
I see Claire
Series of 6 photographs facing the light.
Touching the invisible, what if we tried?Photographs made in 2017 with Mélanie L. -
Figures
Series of 36 photographs at the stake.
Facing each other in affront, shadow and light gaze at each other, contemplate each other, and dance their dance of death. They gyrate (…) -
Engraved surface
Series of 55 engraved photographs.
What remains is the negative, the opposite, the trace in oneself of the presence of the other, now absent.It’s disturbing to me that the word (…) -
Insolation
70 photographies en chambre d’insolation.
De l’insolence des objets qui nous regardent, toujours d’en haut ; de la condescendance des miroirs, qui ne réfléchissent que ce qu’ils veulent ; (…) -
Eruption of the inner sun
Series of 40 burning photographs.
When all of a sudden its own energy melts, destroying everything, even souls, in its path. -
Stretched building
Series of 25 fluid photographs.
With half-closed eyes and a vertical movement of the head, an ordinary building is transformed into a playground for the imagination. -
Future fluids
Series of 35 technical photographs.
We draw on the skin of the world, to prepare the future underground fluid networks. One projects oneself into the underground. It is a poetic (…) -
Chromosome words
Series of 70 inked photographs.
Words that are life. Describe. Are. Self. Words that end up being planted like seeds. The ink that spins and flows, and the gaze that dares not. (…) -
Slippery castle
Series of 70 spinning photographs.
Continued flight into the mental space of old films, in coal black. Eternal staircase, which makes feel the anguish of an ascending fall. -
At your jeweler’s
Series of 15 cropped photographs.
Pricing principle. Metro plan. Illegal travelers. Nazi. Laminated. Shine -
Green sky
Series of 35 photographs of the air.
The invisible matter is rough and colored. -
Red button
Series of 43 floral photographs.
A plant metaphor for the disturbance of consciousness in situations of power.When I looked at this series of photographs after I’d made it, (…) -
Lost in the morning
Series of 25 photographs in the early morning.
At the moment of awakening, the vision is not yet clear, and the mind is not yet precisely anchored in the body. -
Fringe
Series of 50 photos in quantum method.
It is the fact of looking that generates the image, by stopping the movement. If one does not look, things are everywhere at the same time. Poetic (…) -
Brushes
Series of 24 photographs with brushes.
To brush, in a gesture, in a second, the inclination of my life.Brush by the sensitive surface in movements.To compose with several (…) -
Manufacture of the moon
Series of 84 photographs on a potter’s wheel.
Through the trees, the dreams and my hands stretched out towards hope, this moon that gives rhythm to our cycles, I would like to invent it, to (…) -
A tagged life
Living exhibition of 30 photographs.
A “living” online exhibition of 30 photographs, which proposes a narrative in images and words and varies several times a week.In the website (…) -
Bodies thrown in front of empty space
Series of 100 photographs in a hallway.
The empty space, the stage, the fallow field, on which humanity grows. Often, one passes by without stopping. -
91 Gare du Nord
Series of 67 photographs of a bus.
A trigger, and everyone dances, in all directions! -
Laddered
Series of 45 laddered photographs.
If each image flows before our eyes, then the world becomes like a fluid. -
Blue Mouth
Series of 24 photographs of a passage.
Like a whirlwind you fascinate me, you draw me in, you seduce me. I sink into you. -
Words sown on images
Series of 30 photographs illuminated by words.
On my proposal, people have written words opposite images chosen from the thousands that I propose on my website, those that “jumped out at them” (…) -
I.M.L. (Institute of Legal Medicine)
Series of 66 photographs from behind the tree in front.
Your temporary room was there for a fortnight before we moved you to your final resting place. -
Little man
Series of 55 photographs of the projection of a missing person.
I’ve seen you for a long time, and now I understand your particular gait, flattened on the ground, for ever immobile. I try to replay the film but (…) -
A loose ant
Series of 35 hunting photographs.
Quest and non-conquest of an ant lost in the universe of human beings. -
Design of love
Series of 15 danced photographs.
As I approached this simple tree in the city that evening, little by little I felt the powerful energy of its sap, projected towards its highest (…) -
Surface of a morning
Series of 42 photographs downward.
Soil, cement, water, a few trees, traces of tires and old works, cigarette butts, reflections, rising sun, shadows of what overhangs the support (…) -
Louvre-Rivoli
Series of 40 photographs on the platform of a subway station.
Right from the metro station, the museum takes you into its fascinating historical universe, exhilarating for the person who surrenders to it. -
As the bird flies
Series of 55 animal photographs.
What if we put ourselves in the head of a bird? What if we tried to paint its emotions, its look, its vision of the world? -
Soft Fossil
Series of 66 photographs in the heat.
A dead and frozen being comes back to life by dancing around it. -
Dancing tube
Series of 100 photographs of a city’s lights in motion.
Madam, may I have this dance? -
Children’s drawings on the city
85 photographs of drawings projected in an abandoned apartment.
These drawings of life, projected in the now abandoned place of their creation, which will soon disappear from the face of the earth, bring me (…) -
Window troubled by the night
Series of 32 indoor night photographs.
In the middle of the night, an awakening that is not an awakening makes me see the bedroom window as a being that seems to want to tell me (…) -
Social distancing
Series of 58 photographs on a train platform in 2022.
Human beings were led to believe that they had suddenly become dangerous to each other and that they had to step aside to save themselves from the (…) -
Mechanical snail
Series of 99 photographs inside a combustion engine.
Motor, machine, fantastic animal? Animals were our machines. Engines are contemporary forms of life, which feed us. Strange, disquieting, (…) -
Whiteboards
Series of 20 photographs of paintings.
Are these twenty framed paintings in the tunnel of a train station under renovation “real paintings”? Or are they just the frames that make me see (…) -
River bank. Overnight stay. Germany. Love. Romanticism.
A photograph and its two shades.
Night time, back to oneself . -
The scars of the earth
Series of 55 photographs taken from the interior space.
Seen from a great height by infrared, the surface of the earth reveals borders invisible to the naked eye, which are the scars of the affronts it (…) -
Living heart of the machine
Series of 85 photographs of a new life form.
The machine, or machines, are now, and have been for a long time in fact, in mechanical life. They are the lungs of our lives: electricity, (…) -
Fire
Series of 100 event photographs.
The street crackles with the fire that consumes it. It is a powerful breath. And little by little the night is made. The cold comes after the (…) -
Noémie’s bike
Series of 65 urban views around an object.
Kept there, still in good condition.In tribute to Jean-Pierre Beauviala’s inventions for the “life” of the digital image, based on the (…) -
Tree in the city
Series of 34 morning photo pauses.
Puissance et présence de l’arbre au cœur de la banlieue fabriquée. -
Alarm clock
Series of 313 photographs to represent 36 minutes of time.
An attempt to visually symbolize the mental effect of an alarm clock that rings, and rings again, and rings again in the morning... With an (…) -
Vanishing line
Series of 38 still photos.
One morning like any other, on the Austerlitz bridge in Paris, everyone leaves, or runs away, towards his place of activity. What happens in the (…) -
The world seen from the construction site
Series of 21 digital photographs.
What is the city about? To look at the world? Or to be this world that looks at itself and creates itself by looking at itself?The building (…) -
Inner night
Series of 30 photographs of living nature.
This imaginary interior forest, always nocturnal and moving, disturbing, I walk there in my dreams, with difficulty. Large iridescent trees. When (…) -
Paul the tree
Series of 25 photographs of a natural being.
I met Paul in 2021. We danced together.Paul is a tree born here, in a wood next to a big city. He was planted by human beings. He likes to (…) -
Echoes
Series of 129 photographs of organic matter, in motion in a gas.
Echoes from the bottom of our inner oceans -
The rotunda
Series of 24 images.
Have you ever had a strange feeling when entering a theater? Just at the entrance? Remember that fleeting moment of confusion. -
Kolam
Series of photographs of Indian paper, printed 30 years earlier. 81 squares.
The creative invention each morning on the floor in front of one’s house must also be nourished by sharing ideas. I had bought paper magazines of (…) -
Leakage of branches
Series of 50 automatic photographs.
Photographic, digital and railway mechanics produce images that fix natural phenomena as much as their own coordinated natures. Machines as new (…) -
Revolution of the constellation
Series of 27 photographs 23 years later.
Twenty three years later, a light and leaves after the rain return, innumerable, calling for the inscription of their trace. The constellation of (…) -
Chamarande
Series of photographs taken at the Domain of Chamarande (Essonne, France) on January 1, 2021.
A year standing.The sun in the trees, illuminating the earth, water and nature of which we are a part, on this first day of a new year, fills (…) -
Face on face
A face projected on a face, or the mise en abîme of the identity. Images that stay in the headDuring a workshop day that I conducted as part of (…) -
Paper faces #1
Series of photographs. Cubist faces thanks to the tears of torn up advertising postersOn the suggestion of the photographer Myriam Drosne, when (…) -
Parisian sidewalk
Series of photographs. Variation on the experience of a Parisian sidewalk.Shoot with the body, the hand that triggers the camera being an (…) -
Stars
Series of photographs.The long obturation photographs at night with camera movements produce drawings, often very aesthetic visual universe, (…) -
Palissage
Series of photographs.A long pause, in the early evening in June, along the fence that covers the work of the Forum des Halles in Paris. A (…) -
Automatic photo booth
A “Photo Booth” machine with interactive marketing hit me. I made this series of photos into a movie. But in reality, the photos are already in (…) -
Surveillance cameras
For a few months at the end of 2010, I am committed to photographing cameras to observe the machines through which we observed in our knowledge (…) -
The man with the briefcase
In everyday life, all of a sudden, our eye settles on something, and follows it... -
Dust on the walls
Series of photographs.Advertising posters on the walls of cities and transport corridors are to me an extremely aggressive visual factor. I’ve (…) -
Algorithmic squares
The algorithms, which are supposed to square our gaze, open us up to the unsuspected poetry of the world.Series of 27 photos, treated with the (…) -
The kiss of La Défense
Series of photographs. An impromptu kiss ... Parisian tradition? And how our gaze transforms it.One morning in 2007, among the white-collar (…) -
Dead leaves
A roll of 35mm film after it rained in the street in front of my home in 1998, recording dead leaves on its sensitive surface, using a Minolta (…)
See also
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One World October 12, 2019 A film by Benoît Labourdette (0’58s, 2019).
The staging of our intimate journey through daily information. Would the world be transparent? -
Pre-covid A film by Benoît Labourdette (1’, 2022).
A book that presents itself. Published just before the Covid-19 crisis, it reveals the techniques of mass manipulation that were employed during (…) -
Pills Calligrams
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Cold fire at the castle A film by Benoît Labourdette (1’17s, 2023).
At times, past, present, fiction and reality are intertwined. The present moment becomes a tale. -
Let’s imagine a moment - Episode 17 A film by Benoît Labourdette (4’05s, 2009).
Let’s imagine for a moment that this street is the beginning of the world...