Imaginary Journeys

The french photographer Didier Massard constructs imaginary landscapes too real to be anything but fake. His glossy, richly saturated Cibachrome and chromogenic prints of minutely detailed fantasy landscapes are unclassifiable in the world of photography. Each piece has been photographed from a tabletop tableaux that he painstakingly builds and lights in his studio. Magnificent locales created from such materials as cardboard, resin, aluminum foil, scrims, and paint are familiar looking yet impossible to pin down on a map. As passionate as he is patient, he makes only two “fabricated photographs” a year, spending months building, devising, and trying out optical tricks for his tableaux. Artificies, a book of his photographs prefaced by curators at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, is newly available, distributed by Antique Collector’s Club.

~ by dutchtouchart on April 15, 2008.