IA = Icy & Arid

My research revolves around iconic deconstruction and the question of the power of the photographic image in contemporary society.
It has been said that "a photograph depicts what it wants to", that its meaning can be corrupted, and that it then shows one thing and its opposite despite its referent. Deconstructing the documentary image has become a fundamental challenge, pushing back the limits of the frame and narrative. This questioning is paving the way for an upheaval in the status quo that has been fostered by the advent of the digital age.
I chose industrial architecture as the setting for my exhibition because of its duality with photomontage, through the juxtaposition and organisation of volumes assembled like jigsaw puzzles: silos, tanks, ramps, conveyor belts and furnaces.
This architectural typology, already revealed by Bernd and Hilla Becher, enabled me to grasp the freedom of shapes and volumes laid out in space.
A factory is an accumulation of interconnected modules, with the sole aim of transforming matter to produce something else.
In creating my photomontages, I create real false photographs of architecture, blurring the lines of reading and perception, extending the transformation of matter and image by inverting the process; the factory no longer transforms, but is transformed, and the image shows nothing that could be the embodiment of a tautological truth, since the subject has disappeared.
In the image of the industrial design process, which assembles a final product from elements manufactured or produced in the four corners of the world, my constructions, through their spatial organisation, echo the poetry of this contemporary metamorphosis.
Philippe Calandre | 2020