Thursday, January 27, 2011

Beautiful Desolation

The photographic works of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre go beyond exceptional. The Parisian duo have captured something that only time and desolation could have produced. They’ve captured the process of ruination. Of places, once beautiful and ordinary, now surreal and poignant.

This particular photograph stopped me in my tracks. It seems to come straight out of a Salvador Dali painting:

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This statement from Marchand and Meffre says it all:

Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies
and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.
The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at
some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires.
This fragility, the time elapsed but even so running fast, lead us to watch them one very last time :
being dismayed, or admire, making us wondering about the permanence of things.
Photography appeared to us as a modest way
to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state.

http://www.marchandmeffre.com/index.html

seen via Graphic-Exchange

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