Thomas Chéné is a Paris-based photographer. After earning a BA in History and Art History, he moved to Paris to study photography in Gobelins, l’école de l’image (2011). He works in advertising, as well as portraiture and on the development of his own projects. Today we share his series Truth and Consequences.
Truth and Consequences
”The town was full of people looking for the man or the woman who could save them.” Throughout a long photographic voyage across the USA, this work echoes this extract of Don DeLillo’s Americana. These portraits and landscapes try to reconstitute the feeling of transience and indecision met within this America of small towns. The moments chosen are those in which the solitude, confusion, and fragility of the individual seem to touch the visible surface of being.
I decided to focus on America, especially the lost one: these little towns in the middle of nowhere, the roads, and the wild spaces. An important part of this work consisted of meeting the locals, learning about their lives and listening to their stories, and then asking them to be ephemeral models. The indeterminacy of the forms seemed to turn them into characters and we moved into a suspended world: this very American hesitation between the film and the banal, the epic and absence. I traveled a weightless America, which still does not know its past, and seems to look to an indecipherable future.
To view more of Thomas’s work, please visit his website.