‘PIRAMID’ AND ‘DIAGIONALE’
We invite the French photographer Raoul Gatepin to briefly introduce two of his photographic series Piramid and Diagonale. His images, simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, guide us through an emotional geography. His language, deliberately anti-cultural, seems to scratch perception by generating enough expressionist feelings to weight things as they are and to fill the gap with the modern spectacle. The land of everyday becomes again an indispensable reality to avoid imbecilization.
«The Piramid pictures are from a project I shot in reaction to the financial mess of late 2008. I found myself living in New York at that time, the home of Wall Street and thus the center of attention of most news reports. In them there were a lot of images depicting a frantic city, taken aback by the events. But I was seeing something different, more powerlessness and resignation than real surprise at the situation. I wanted to illustrate that feeling and think about how we got there. About the Diagonale: during my early years in the U.S., my returns to France were transient and hasty. In the summer of 2008, I decided to spend the entirety of my short American vacation time in France. My idea was to visit places of my homeland that I knew very little or not at all. Driving along the “Diagonale du Vide” (=”Diagonal of Emptiness”) from one camp site to another seemed fitting. “Diagonal du Vide” is a quite pejorative, but also very poetic way to define this band of French territory where the density of population is very low compared to the rest of the country. It runs approximately from Southwest to Northeast France. The photos in this series were all taken along the diagonal.»
© All copyright remains with photographer Raoul Gatepin