Urban Archaeology

Stéphane Couturier

Since 1994, Stéphane Couturier has been exhibiting a series of works that paved the way for his work titled Archéologie Urbaine (Urban Archaeology). He photographs the city as a living, multifaceted organism removed from any poetry, nostalgia or exoticism. His works, which he shoots with a folding camera, are successions of numerous layers that eliminate all perspective and depth of field. This frontality is accompanied by a strictly orthogonal framing of the image and lends the objects an astounding plasticity. The individual layers merge and provoke an immaculate smoothness that levels the hierarchy of the elements in photography. There is neither foreground nor background, nor a significant principal theme, but rather a spatially and temporally open, atmospheric picture of the location that combines a forgotten past, a turbulent present and an evolving future. An initiative within the framework of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the city partnership between Paris and Berlin.