beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Shadow

Terrils d’Europe du Nord Slag Heaps of Northern Europe

Jean Attali / John Davies

John Davies, the renowned English landscape photographer, set up his camera in northern France, near Béthune. Landscapes of the mining basin, the slag heaps have altered the very structure of the territory, offering the photographer the opportunity to create variations on this geographical feature.

As is his custom, Davies captures in a wide shot what structures these landscapes, bear witness to a bygone industry. This perspective on the world of mining is not new for the photographer. Indeed, in the 1980s, John Davies photographed English mining landscapes, notably in Wales, a series that helped establish his considerable talent.

Thus, the book's structure revisits the photographer's career, juxtaposing nearly thirty years of work in Great Britain with his most recent work in France. It also contrasts two regions of two countries that mining has fundamentally transformed, and with which the reader will undoubtedly find many commonalities.

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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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