Reviews & Articles

Caption:
Stéphane Couturier. "Melting Point" Series - La Havane. 2006/ Photo nº 1. Courtesy of Galerie Polaris, Paris.

(原文以法文撰寫，中文翻譯請往下看。 This article was originally written in French and is a review of Stéphane Couturier's works. Please scroll down to read the Chinese translation. )

Stéphane Couturier was born in 1957 and currently lives and works in Paris. Since 1994, he has produced exhibits of his work, grouped by series: Urban Archeology focusing on evolving urban spaces; Generic Cities: Landscaping; and the series Melting Point, which was unveiled at the same time as the work on the Toyota factories in 2005.

Stéphane Couturier sees cities, industry and built landscapes as premises for questioning the relationship between the work of art and the subject being represented. This duality - the inseparability of documentary study and the pursuit of a personal visual aesthetic - characterizes all of his photographic works.

In his earliest works, he captures the city in transition: the city as an assemblage of cranes, scaffolding, pipes and building materials. Rather than isolate a building as an architectural object, he seeks to emphasize its wider context. In fact, Stéphane Couturier views the city as an ever-changing work site, as a living organism whose innards must be exposed, whether the subject be Berlin, Havana, Seoul or San Diego:

“I am interested in producing ambiguous images, images that lie at the junction of a series of documentary, aesthetic, urban and sociological analyses. "

"Whereas architectural photography often isolates an architectural objects from any meaningful context, my photographic approach, which emphasizes the purity of the illuminated three-dimensional form, evokes the city’s “contextuality". The truly great cities are markedly heterogeneous. Cities are hubs for unceasing architectural activity. Time -- especially the temporal relationship between man and urban space -- is the contemplative notion driving this work. Cities are the result of successive stratifications. By juxtaposing a series of representative finished buildings and vertical cross-sections of the bowels of the initial work sites, I am exploring the sedimentary aspect of cities. My work places this built landscape in a temporal nether region. This city can be compared to a living organism. It is constantly changing. I see work sites as a sort of wound to a very dense urban fabric that accentuate urban verticality by evoking the city’s seemingly unlikely architectural roots, proliferating according to its wealth of historical sediment. "

While the documentary approach is still present in Couturier’s latest series "Melting Point", he no longer considers it sufficient to offer up a simple celebration of beauty. The object here is to expand on photography’s documentary aspect, to shift and move beyond its narrative dimension while keeping intact its constitutive documentary elements: reality is no longer made up of isolated things with fixed geometric shapes, but instead becomes a reality in flux and in perpetual motion and transformation.

Rather than focusing on one perspective, this project seeks to question the notion of subject by superimposing two photographic records. The resulting duality provides a fresh outlook on the recorded reality. The figuratively abstract series “Melting Point” confronts the intersection of two photographs and shifts the representation back and forth between document and fiction:

"In any event, the combination of these two shots attempts to reveal the increasing complexity of the world in which we operate. The human aspect itself is questioned: in the spirit of Charlie Chaplin’s "Modern Times", what is humanity’s place in this robotic, ultra efficient, ultra rational world?  In creating these photographs, I sought to question our perception of the world, constantly caught in a temporal nether region between document and fiction, between tangible reality and virtual reality.”

The technical and aesthetic protocols applied to achieve these photographs enable an expanded vision of their documentary aspect and a shift beyond their narrative dimension while keeping intact their constitutive documentary elements.

斯特凡． 古特日埃 (Stéphane Couturier) 生於1957年，現於巴黎定居和工作。自1994年開始致力籌辦攝影作品展覽，其系列作品包括：專門探討城市空間演化的「城市考古學」(Archéologie urbaine)、典型城市 (Villes génériques)、城市造景 (Landscaping)，以及2005年拍攝豐田車廠作品：「熔點」系列。

斯特凡．古特日埃認為城市、工業和人造景觀是前提，來探討藝術作品與主題之間的關係。紀錄式研究與個人的視覺美學追求是不可分割的二元體，亦是貫穿古特日埃所有作品的風格特色。

斯特凡．古特日埃嘗試以一系列藝術手法，把拍攝對象視作不斷演變和多層面的生命體。色彩和材料的組合，配以前衛直接的手法，為拍攝場景渲染出一種戲劇感。

他的早期作品捕捉了變遷中的城市：把城市看作一個起重機、棚架、管道和建築材料的組合。在斯特凡．古特日埃眼裡，樓宇不只是單獨的建築物，而是有更深遠的涵意。事實上，他把城市看作不停變遷的建築工地和生命體，其內在物有必要揭示出來，無論是柏林、哈瓦那、首爾還是聖地牙哥，都無一例外。誇張地揭示構成城市肌理的層次和形式，營造出一系列充滿美學的、紀錄性的、都市的和社會學的多層面影像。

雖然他的新作「熔點」中仍然可見紀錄式的拍攝手法，但是他已不再認為這足以崇拜對美的簡單祝頌，而應該拓展攝影作品的紀錄手法，去轉移和突破陳述式紀錄的界限，同時保留紀錄片的元素、保持原貌：現實不再是單獨固定幾何形狀事物的集合，而是現實的流動、永恆的運動和形態的轉換。

「大致意念是把兩張同一主題的照片扣連，並在當中展現主題的互補性。例如，同時扣連一座建築物的內外面，或建築物的前後面，或以亞維儂藝術節中展出的圖片，與亞維儂藝術節周邊或期間所拍攝的照片扣連起來。

「最後，豐田阿爾斯通車廠照片背後的意念，是結合生產線兩個不同的階段，加強相片效果，渲染生產過程中複雜度。這系列的照片是為了傳遞一種全新有現代特色的行進、聲音和混雜性質，當中所產生的不同感覺。」

「在任何事情，這兩個快照組合，都試圖展當代與日俱增的複雜性。人類自身被質疑：從查理．卓別靈的《摩登時代》中的現代精神角度來看，人文在這個機械的、超高效的、超理性的世界中到底處於甚麼位置？在創作這些照片時，我試圖質疑我們對這世界的觀念，在一個暫時虛空的地獄中，不斷地徘徊在紀錄和虛構之中，糾纏於有形現實和虛擬實境之間。」

Exhibition: Playgrounds - Contemporary French Photography
Date: 6.4. – 2.5.2012
Venue: Avenue of Stars, Tsimshatsui

本文原刊於《東西譚》2012年4月
A version of this article appeared in Paroles, No. 232, April 2012.