Pascal Amoyel is a photographer whose work explores the distance between the neutrality of documentary style photography and the subjective glance specific to the photographic process. More specifically, he’s working on the place of photography inside the space of the book. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Recently, his series Western Surveys has won the Honorable Mention Award from Shane Lavalette, guest curator of the exhibition OPEN, at the Center For Fine Art Photography, Colorado. He also won the Second Place at FotoFilmic’14 Prize, from an international jury including Mark Steinmetz and Alejandro Cartagena. He’s part of the exhibition Image as Place, a French Statement, Michèle Chomette Gallery, Paris (January-March 2015). Today we take a look at Pascal’s series Levés d’Ouest (Western Surveys).
Levés d’Ouest (Western Surveys)
Survey : Topographic surveys are meant to locate the main physical features on the ground,such as lakes, rivers, roads, forest or large rocks.They provide data for map making.
“Shot in France (2013-14) with a field camera 4*5 inches, Western Surveys seeks to capture the impermanent essence of the relationship between man and its land. Made up from documentary style photographs and fragments of a personal path, this series depicts the unstable way people inhabit places, and how people and places inhabit images.
Initiated in the Western part of France called Brittany, where dispersed pattern of settlements, despite an old and obvious human history, gives human presence a singular and ephemeral aspect, this work focuses on places that combine signs of human habitation and vividness of nature. Travelling back east from this end of Old-Europe, Western Surveys designs the map of a territory where men try to live in an ever changing space.”
In addition Amoyel’s work has been shown at Newspace Center for Photography, (Radical Color, 2015), at the Morris Museum of Augusta (Ain’t Bad at Art Now, Oct. 2014), at Back Gallery Project (Vancouver, 2014), in Of The Afternoon’s Exhibition (London, 2014), in TGV Magazine (Paris, 2014), in the PhotobookFest (Paris 2013) and in Infra-mince (Actes-Sud / ENSP 2013).
To view more of Pascal’s work please visit his website.