beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Hidden River

John Davies / Armelle Canitrot

The Tiretaine is not the first river that the English photographer John Davies has chosen as a guiding thread to explore and understand a landscape. His images of the Mersey, the Po, the Nervión, the Loire, the Taff, the Arno, the Seine, and the Durance have already captured what these waterways reveal about the tensions—between beauty and necessity, past and present, public and private, economy and ecology, nature and urbanism—woven into a landscape shaped by successive political choices. Sometimes flowing freely in the open air, but more often covered over, cemented, channeled, suspected of pollution, and deprived of its freedom, the Tiretaine is not immune to the various issues already raised by the previous works of this "geographer-photographer."

Although quite modest in size, the Tiretaine is nonetheless the waterway that placed John Davies in one of the most paradoxical situations imaginable for a photographer: capturing the image of a river playing hide-and-seek for more than half its length. In other words, revealing the invisible. Its playful nature did not diminish the observational skills of this meticulous investigator, who quickly embraced a healthy division of the waters, capturing it in color when it frolics in the open air, and in black and white when it slips underground. [excerpt from the text]

This work was produced in partnership with the City of Clermont-Ferrand.

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