CHRISTOPHE BOURGUEDIEU "Tavastia"

© christophe bourguedieu

Christophe Bourguedieu photographs cultures as if by osmosis. This work is the result of a short but intense season in Finland, recently published as Tavastia by Le Point du Jour.
Bourguedieu s translation of this period of time is defined in a visual language seemingly drawn directly from the emotion radiated by human encounter, its dislocation and its unsatisfactory afterglow of not being able to give or receive enough love.
We bear witness to these emotions through the 1000 yard stare of an ice-maiden in a street scape. Here the photographer, maiden and street all coalesce as disparate emotion. We sit together with Christophe and a man in a trucker cap at a wooden table and feel the silence between them.
Christophe s receptor-camera also soaks up the raw emotive power of the inanimate object. A TV rests uneasily in frame, its tube amped up but unable to respond to transmission from base. A stag s bleeding scalp with intactus antlers is seemingly flung on a bar-room table leaving us to contemplate the demise of the rest of its body. We are told we are in Finland yet functionally we travel in Bourguedieuland. The artist clearly scrutinises the timetable of the mundane without ever allowing his photographs to conform to predictably defined geometries of visual language.
Max Pam 2004

© christophe bourguedieu

CHRISTOPHE BOURGUEDIEU (photographer, France)
Born 1961 in Marrakech, Morocco, Christophe Bourguedieu is part of the cutting edge of the new wave of French photography. In 1996, he won the Prix Kodak de la Critique Photographique (Paris) with L Amateur de jardins. His first monograph Le Cartographe, (Le Point du Jour Editeur, 2000) was based on a series of haunting images from several revisits to his birthplace between 1996-1998. Bourguedieu worked in Finland between 1998-2000 creating the dreamlike surreal images which would become his second book Tavastia (Le Point du Jour Editeur, 2002). His latest book Eden, published in October 2004, is a series carried out in the United States in continuation of Tavastia. Currently he is working on a project in Japan.
Bourguedieu has exhibited widely throughout Europe and his work is held in many public collections including Musee de la Photographie de Finlande (Helsinki, Finland), Fonds National d Art Contemprain (Paris) and Fondation Italienne pour la Photographie (Turin, Italy).

Tavastia appears courtesy of Foto Freo

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