beaux livres : photo, architecture, art

Discover is the story of a journey into the future perfect. This book reveals the contrasts of contemporary China, a country in constant construction, where cities spring up from the ground as if by magic. Despite the violence of this frenetic pace, François Daireaux’s photographs and the texts of sinologist Emmanuel Lincot exude a rare poetic intensity. Discover is THE book on China, the main challenge of our century. To create the images, François Daireaux traveled to more than a hundred Chinese cities rarely visited by foreigners. These are places where the arrogance of the powerful, the exploitation of the weak, and contempt for human life have taken on the most ruthless forms. This prescient book shows us a devastated China. Many other disasters are looming on the horizon. Yet man still has his place there. This photographic journey began in Anshan in 2004 in northeastern China, then continued from city to city, further and further west, ending in 2018 in the Uyghur region.As he traveled from city to city, François Daireaux immersed himself in Chinese reality, observing the staggering spread of urbanization on an immeasurable scale, scrutinizing the tension between megalomaniacal architecture and the tiny lives of people who are lost, sometimes driven mad, as if stunned in this new world of concrete and steel. The result is situations of extreme violence, but also sometimes incongruous or burlesque.

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