Stéphane Duroy, Photography, And Then…

About

Landscapes stuck in an endless winter, emptied of any human presence. A silhouette wandering in city streets, as if escaped from an apocalyptic film. In color or in black and white, Stéphane Duroy’s photographs impose themselves upon the spectator’s gaze, loaded with the weight of absence, evoking the silent crash of a shattered world, but also, the painful beauty of disenchantment.

For more than forty years, Stéphane Duroy has traveled throughout Europe and the United States in search of the founding events that shaped the 20th century and their consequences on individuals. Initially working as a photojournalist, he gradually detached himself from documentary work to devote himself to the elaboration of a demanding photographic work, published in a dozen books. If the book constitutes for him the culmination of his practice, it has also become, in recent years, the support of an incessant questioning of the limits of his medium. Thanks to the collage, the erasure and the covering of his photographs, Stéphane Duroy develops his reflection on the role of the artist and the impotence of images to express the unspeakable.

“Photography, And Then…” offers a rereading of this singular journey, through a selection of photographs from his different series, taken in Berlin, the Czech Republic or Montana, mixed with unique copies of his book Unknown #2, as well as recent acrylic paintings. The ensemble forms a condensed version of half a century of creation, a production with shifting forms and constant reinvention.

“I don’t respect photography, I desecrate it completely and use it as a brush, paint, stencil, letter or word.” Stéphane Duroy