Tourists #1

Nicolas Dhervillers

Tourists fresh in from Miami Beach, Mexico, Moscow or Vladivostok find themselves totally alone and uprooted. This is an unmappable world where bearings are lost, that seems as unlikely as its new inhabitants. This series raises the question of taking yet more photos when everything seems to have already been done, repeated and reproduced. Reappropriating existing images, available to everyone with just a click is one of the many answers. Unlike the series « Day for night » (Nuit Américaine) , where the photographs had titles like ‘Colorado xx’ and told us something about the places seen in them (in fact a trick as the photographs were taken in the South of France), the initial idea behind this new series was to radically change night photos that I had already taken and that had a pictorialist tendency, in order to create a new non-place. A sort of « zone » (in reference to Tarkovsky’s film ‘Stalker’), a secret, spiritual, and even dangerous place. Relighting certain parts of the photo has been used as much for the slowly changing, and almost surreal nature as for the people. The sort of photograph that is the most widespread on the net is, without contest, the holiday snap. So I carried out a universal ‘casting’ session by spending hours googling portraits of anonymous people, looking for the most banal image possible. Out of context « my » tourists visit the photographs, and provide food for thought as to whether they really are explorers or mere « spectators ». They are probably not ready to go into this « zone » where everything is possible. They are slaves in this intermission, mistakenly becoming survivors of the internet, in a universe that is somewhere between science fiction and witchcraft, between fear and faith. A strong lateral light source hints at what is beyond the frame of each photograph. The tourists seem to be caught in a moment of contemplation, between absence and presence. If belief in these images is strong at first glance, in fact it is only a sham. By looking at these photos in more detail it is hard to define this impression of light that bursts from a place that cannot be recreated in real life. By extrapolating a little, you can almost see in these characters the expression of people on parole. They have escaped from a cavern, in the philosophical Platonic sense of the term, and have come into contact with the « real » world, which is paradoxically blinding. Lambda print, 70 x 87,50 cm limited edition of 7, and 40 x 50 cm limited edition of 15, series of 12 photographs.