maxime – New Landscape Photography

Through the installation Pavillons et Totems I question our relationship with history and myths by exploring a little-known or evolving heritage conveying experienced or legendary stories that stem from the construction of a collective narrative.

Tied to the former Franco-Belgian mining region, my approach is that of an ethnographer of humble places. At the CRP in Douchy-les-Mines, France I am presenting a set of photographs along with a sound montage played in the art center space, forming an installation that invites visitors to consider various sites and plunge into the stories these sites echo.

At the edge of a forest, at the end of a road, behind a curtain of trees, monuments loom up like apparitions, many of them ordinary ones that speak to the inhabitants of these territories and open their imagination. Their stories can be heard, like “micro narratives” forming a discontinuous and digressive narrative that envelops visitors and stimulates their imagination.

By superimposing images of places and stories of inhabitants like a mosaic, I poetize spaces by opening them to a multiplicity of perspectives and voices. Through these micro narratives, I allow the inhabitants of these places to reclaim their history and the history of their territory.

— Maxime Brygo, Lille, France

July 26, 2011October 2, 2011

Maxime Delvaux & Kevin Laloux

www.354.be

Leisure is a collective work realized by two photographers: Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux.

Leisure is defined by the activity that we do outside the time taken by our usual occupations. It is the activities that we choose to do. Those are of all nature: cultural, sporting, recreational, etc. The idea of this work is to analyze the means used to practice those activities as well as the people involved in them. First of all, in a formal way, through the architecture of these places devoted to leisure and the sites in which they are established.

This work tends to translate into images the infrastructures and architectures developed by a state or a region, to promote a territory and to make a site attractive in a touristic or recreational way. This project is also about public and private places allowing the practice of a leisure activity. What importance does the city leave them, and how are they implanted in the urban landscape?

Further than this formal approach, it is interesting to analyze the use made of these places by people, and the way in which they make those places alive and their own. Photographing these people — in this particular context they have chosen to live — allows us to capture in them something real and personal.

— Maxime Delvaux & Kevin Laloux, Brussels, Belgium

March 30, 2011

Maxime Brygo

MaximeBrygo.com

Newland presents photographs of spaces built in the last few years in five new Dutch towns. This project questions the construction of the identity of these towns. How have these cities with no history been drawn and laid out? What has been erected there? Which monuments for which celebrations? However, we don’t have enough distance with these objects to be able to appreciate their legacy value for the next generations. It seems that photography, by freezing places and times in such spaces, vouches for or creates the legacy status of these objects.

The drawn spaces take shape through the photographic staging, whose role is here to create a moment – a moment and a monument. Newland is an imaginary space because it merges the landscapes of five cities. These landscapes present a scenography of the promotional/advertising town. This photographic corpus claims to be, maybe paradoxically, an archive in becoming. We ask ourselves the question of durability, while facing landscapes that were still but drawings half a century ago. Now it’s up to the viewer to question the shift between the imagined territory, photographed here, and the representation of reality, that often escapes us.

— Maxime Brygo