Stephane Couturier, Photography, 1997

Stephane Couturier Ilot Edouard VII - Paris 9 Dye bleach print, 30.0 x 38.0 in (76.2 x 96.5 cm) Signed, numbered, dated, and titled on verso Numbered V/VIII Stephane Couturier was born in France, in 1957. His photographs are in major museum collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Los Angeles County Museum, National Gallery of Canada, Grand-Duc Jean Museum in Luxembourg, Art Institute of Chicago… Couturier began his career as an art photographer in his native Paris in the early 1990’s and has since made significant bodies of work. The photographs of Stephane Couturier, whether of construction sites in Berlin, demolished buildings in Havana, or an automobile assembly plant in Valenciennes, are all about transformation, a subject he explores with a strong sense of design and composition and a specific sense of color. « Urban archeology » serie made in cities like Berlin, Paris, Seoul, Moscow, Havana, …. Whether through images of demolition or construction, the unique energy and vitality of his photographs accentuate the temporal turbulence of metropolitan areas of the world. This serie shows visually complex sites exhibiting dynamic vertical and horizontal lines, elegant curves, and brilliant effects of light and indigenous color. « Melting Point » serie In this series Couturier extends his decades long project of exploring how modern cultures simultaneously construct and destroy. Using a large format camera, Couturier creates crisply detailed prints that expand the viewer’s awareness of how a photograph can look and how urban occurrences can be conceptualized. Each picture is printed from a sandwiching of two moments in time, creating highly abstract yet precisely detailed images. People, machines, car parts, wires and more all compete for the viewer’s attention—images of industry simultaneously out of control and in perfect harmony. Videos : For each video, the process sets out to maintain a certain frontality in relation to the subject portrayed in order to strip it of effect. The intensified image becomes a living scene in which the flows of the city come and go with the current of urban life. Moreover, the videos are in loop, so they are not conceived in the form of a dramatic progression, instead revealing itself as a globality which is somehow out side time, somewhere which stretches, kneads and condenses time. It is thus clearly shown that reality is no longer made up of separate things, of fixed geometrical forms, but has become something fluid, in a constant state of movement and transformation.