Janie Julien-Fort: Ephemerals Landscapes

The artist makes use of a technique called solargraphy—a photographic process requiring exposure times that often span several months. Attached to various landscape elements, at the mercy of the weather and attracting the curious, hundreds of small pinhole cameras scrutinize the outskirts of several construction sites. Serving as makeshift surveillance cameras, tracking the evolution of the sites over time.

These apparatuses use the technique of solargraphy: they have neither a mechanism nor a lens – what happens is, sunlight passes through a tiny pinhole, which results in a print on photosensitive paper. Each picture requires several months of exposure time. At the conclusion of this long cohabitation with the landscape, the pictures unveil their own chaos: the randomness of movements, blurry areas, accidents of light. The world does not appear as harmonious, and our eye loses its bearings: the wavering images of these ephemeral construction sites evoke the fragility of photography and of passing time, just like the subtle traces left by the path of the sun. The instability of the medium has great expressive potential to create fictional breaches in which past, present and future seem to converge. This helps in producing new spaces filled with ghosts, dust and scratches that disclose indiscernible stories. Thus, the falling to ruin images, paired with the subject matter, bring the viewer back to his own fragility.

Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort
Ephemerals Landscapes © Janie Julien-Fort

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