beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

La Montagne

Michel Poivert / Christophe Bourguedieu

From the outset, the city's form is immediately apparent: the mountain of the title is indeed there, in the background, as are the forests, and streets, houses, a viaduct. Characters appear. Unusually for this author, they are active and captured in a particular moment of their lives, against the backdrop of poignantly ugly public facilities or the forests encircling the city. The arrangement of the photographs, in rhythmic "sentences," gradually reveals another interpretation of the narrative: from the opening, the street leading to the Michelin factory and its smoking chimneys under an orange sky appears as the stage for a provincial tragedy, the columns thus depicted foreshadowing the enchanted woods where a white dog keeps watch. Suppressed passions stir. A man fires a pistol, a young woman turns her head away, exhausted rugby players collapse on the field like defeated knights.

The Mountain shows us how Christophe Bourguedieu's universe adapts to describe our contemporaries, the mixing of times, the presence of "people", and engages without hesitation in a re-enchanted prosaicness.

“In the United States (Eden), Finland (Tavastia), and Australia (The Passengers), Christophe Bourguedieu has long worked to capture, through bodies, gazes, paths, and architecture, the feeling of a contemporary Western world. What the artist perceives is the reservoir of humanity. Places where a community maintains its democratic heritage in a transparent secrecy. For once in France, with La Montagne, he offers us a ballad—a genre usually reserved for music, but which I see as an equivalent here—a photographic ballad, therefore, to immerse ourselves in the space of the community.” (Excerpt from the text by Michel Poivert).

Entrusted to Guillaume Pavageau, the graphic designer of the James Gray book, the design of La Montagne plays on contrasts of materials and directly echoes the images by reconciling the mundane and the refined. Furthermore, the choice of a unique typeface, with its evocative name – Univers – also contributes to giving this publication a technical connotation, particularly suited to the artist's message.

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