1. «How can one convey, for example, the idea of a town without pigeons, without trees or gardens, where you hear no beating of wings or rustling of leaves, in short, a neutral place? The change of season can only be detected in the sky.» I find that approaching these words of Albert Camus (taken from The Plague, 1947) with some pictures of your ‘Nature Urbaine’ series dedicated to the city of Tangier can move more than an argument on the perception of space and time in places of contemporary life. While this may seem a paradox, you believe that the need to maintain a direct contact with nature, even and especially in these places, also has to do with a kind of need to “measure time” - and therefore the entire space surrounding reality - in a more “human” way?
«This series, realized in Tangiers is the beginning of a new series that will deal with the vegetal side of towns. Through the example of four towns – Tangiers, Marseille, Edinburgh, and Leipzig –, I will show four states of nature in an urban area. I see a town as being totally part of nature. After all, isn’t it simply the settlement of the human mammal? I am not opposing these two types of spaces, what is important to me is the complex relationships that they entertain and how they are very different from one town to another. In the series made in Tangiers, the town grows; new neighborhoods are emerging and growing on the surrounding meadows. These constructions are extremely standardized, the places on which they are being constructed have no importance, there is no town planning, no link with the Moroccan way of life. They are buildings for people to live in, not homes. This produces quite fascinating landscapes because we are confronted with a world springing up in front of our eyes and we cannot help but think it is heading to its downfall. Who is going to live in those dehumanized dwellings? What will happen of those complex in 10 or 15 years? Those landscapes are condensing such a contemporary duality: growth / decay.»
2. After all, the issue of time seems to be central to many of your photo projects. Do you agree? Especially in the work Observatoire du Paysage Photographique, dedicated to the Vallée de l’Hérault, you come back several times to portray the same place years later, almost with the need to extend the boundaries of the photographic medium and to develop a more complex story. In this sense, the extreme speed with which a human landscape is evolving today (as referring to your own work MUE, paysages autour du chantier du Viaduc de Millau et de l’A75) could perhaps narrow the scope of photography to a ‘nostalgic’ representation of reality?
«It is not the passage of time as such that interests me, but rather the dynamic of a landscape, its living and changing aspect. Of course time has something to do with it, but not only. So many things have an effect on landscapes and change our perception – because this is what we are really talking about, are we not? –: the weather, the hand of man, the passers-by… I like the idea that a photographed landscape has already changed once the photograph is taken. Concerning my work on the Millau viaduc, what fascinated me are the ephemeral aspects that a landscape can adorn. Men work on landscape as if it was modeling clay, things go real fast. It reminds me of those images taken by Land artists in the 70s in order to showcase their works in galleries. To track down those involuntary shapes, to frame them in ways that make them appear as involuntary sculptures, this is what motivated this work. It gives the idea of a living matter landscape.»
«This is also what triggered the Photographic Observatories that Bertrand Stofleth and I are animating for local authorities. It aims at retaking each year photographs of a territory from a selected number of viewpoints. This so typically French protocol – in France we adore observatories – enables a watch on landscapes and brings elected officials, residents, anyone involved in fact, to a realization of how fragile a landscape is. For it is nothing but a human construction that our actions, our traveling, our ways of life deeply alter. This realization is a call for self-restraint. To sum it up, the series of photographs that we bring into being expresses at the same time the fragility and the vitality of our world.»
3. Often, visiting for the first time places known only through their mediated interpretation becomes the search of a confirmation of the idea that of them we have already. Like searching for the Buenos Aires of Borges or the Paris of the Nouvelle Vague. Among the many images that we will meet of those places, we will choose the one that comes closest to our most intimate vision. What seems to tie together very different cities like Marseille, Beirut, Valence, Algiers, Gênes and Tripoli in your series Dos à la mer is a well-defined idea of “Mediterranean”. It’s something you focused during the course of work or is it a research project from the beginning, with a precise purpose? Tell us about the genesis and development of this project.
«The origin of this work lies in a questioning about what unites those cities beyond their simple location on the edge of the Mediterranean and the common history that derives from it. Is it still possible, in a world of standardized architecture, of privatized spaces, to identify a Mediterranean type of town? And if we can answer the question positively, where does it come from? What does it reveal? I made the deliberate choice not to shoot the waterfront. I rambled through residential neighborhoods, eschewing well-known historical places, in search of the tiniest signs, trying to pinpoint the least common denominators. The answer I give did not come to me immediately. Besides it is an extremely personal answer, one felt-through a journey. I do not pretend to be an urbanism specialist or a sociologist; my work as a photographer aims at taking a fresh look and trying to convey the personal experience of my peregrinations through those towns. I also felt the need to record a live soundtrack of my strolls. Eventually, my own supposition is that the organization of spaces, the laissez-faireism of town planning policies, the temperament of the residents, the weather, all of this actually leaves a lot of room for town dwellers to express themselves. At the balconies, on the street corners, in the abandoned plots of land… there are so many livable spaces people are appropriating. It is those signs, those gestures, those patterns that I wanted to reveal. Those fragments of poetic resistance do mark a belonging to the Mediterranean world.»
4. The desire to identify a precise language and to seek your own personal aesthetic appears very clear. Without necessarily having to talk about models in photography, what are your main references?
«I recently acquired a wonderful exhibition catalogue “La Carte d’Après Nature” (Mack edition). This exhibition organized in Monaco and curated by the artist Thomas Demand gave me the opportunity to rediscover the work of Luigi Ghirri. Frankly, I found myself a new reference! Luigi Ghirri, never stopped looking for ways to resolve the “landscape problem”, that is to say the reduction of the difference between nature itself and its photographic description. None of the photographs of nature truly resemble nature! This resonates within me because I have never been a believer in documentary photography and works that are too self-explanatory are a source of ennui for me. My images are not intended to merely give a descriptive account of a place; they are not geographical reports, not even demonstrations of a postulate. The subjects or geographical zones on which I operate are, I gather, only excuses to work on my photographic vision and to try to understand which photographer I am. My images are only intended as testimonies of a personal look. Luigi Ghirri once wrote: “Essentially, photography does nothing more than representing an individual perception of the world”. It may seem like stating the obvious, but it generates a constant reconsideration of your photographic practice and of what you aim at expressing through it.»
Interview by Andrea Filippin
© All copyright remains with photographer Geoffroy Mathieu