PAST EXHIBITION
Yves and Romain: Contemporary Ruins
June 19, 2008—July 20, 2008

Press Release

“Contemporary Ruins” is a new photographic series by the French Photography team of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. This project is based on a series of photographs that show what Yves and Romain call, “An urban archeology… focusing on historic buildings in a state of vanishing.”

This series of photographs proposes to the spectators a sublimated vision of these abandoned constructions and give them a statute work of art, like a melancholic person, and they are deeply magic.

Yves and Romain work around urban archaeology and they photograph the contemporary ruins of the buildings in a state of transition before rehabilitation or demolition. Since 2001, the pair has been interested in the abandoned buildings: undergrounds, old industries and deserted urban areas. With the wire of their explorations, they became increasingly sensitive to the scarcity and the singularity of the historical buildings and evolved together to a style, a manner of photographing, and a common vision. The condition of the cities, the “genocide architectural”, pushed them to continue their investigations in France, Belgium, England, Spain, Italy, and more recently in Germany and the United States.

For them, it is initially a question of keeping small traces of these often ignored buildings, always a part of the social context and history. Their inspiration is simple, “Since some years, perpetual demolitions led us to make pictures, a way to keep a little bit of this vanishing history.” They feel that by photographing the state of ruin, it can be the final stage, a symbolic system, of the life of these masonries. The photographs represent, in their eyes, a true sublimation of the structure. And to look at them one last time is an incentive.

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