Troisième territoire, a series of diptychs by Frédéric Delangle, on show at the Maison de l’architecture en Ile-de-France, not far from the Gare de l’Est in the north of Paris, was the first show I visited in the Mois de la Photo as it was about to close.
Delangle was born in the Paris region in 1965 and studied photography at Paris VIII University from 1989-94 before working as an architectural and landscape photographer. For almost all his work he has used a large format 4×5 camera with colour film.
In Troisième territoire, he pairs urban views from cities in the North (mainly France and Switzerland) with those from the South (India, Japan, Bangkok…) Like many other urban landscapists, his preferred view is usually from on high, looking down, although some views are from street level.
Although the intentions of the pairings is perhaps to draw attention to the similarities and differences between the two halves of our world – the haves and the have-nots – the pairings seem often to be chosen simply in visual terms, concentrating on the surface rather than function. Thus (use this link to open the pair in a separate window) a view of allotment gardens in the outer Paris estates of Pantin, with the tower blocks of the public housing behind them (and perhaps with another such block providing the viewpoint) is paired with the roofs of a shanty town in New Bombay, the little plots of green with their garden sheds forming a similar patch-work to the corrugated sheets of the dwellings.
In fact, often the juxtapositions within a single image – for example that of Bombay – that are more telling than those between it and its neighbour image of Basle. Most if not all these images were actually taken as single images in other sequences, as can be seen on Delangles web site, and although I found many of the images intersting, the overall concept was perhaps unconvincing.
Another pairing – the third down on the Terre Entière site – has at its left a fairly random movement of people on the streets of Paris below six giant portrait heads on the frontage of a Commerzbank building, and at right a far more enigmatic image of some kind of organised manifestation on the streets of Bangkok, the edge of the pavement lined by young men in identical white shirts and blue shorts, apparently waiting for something to happen. The Bangkok picture to me seems to work at a very different level and to raise very different questions, although it supplies annoyingly few clues as to their answers. It was one of many times in Paris that I longed for a better caption.
The text accompanying the show links the work to Dusseldorf school, but one could equally look at other sources, including an older tradition of urban landscape, or even the same nineteenth century USAmerican landscape tradition that was also referenced by the New Topographics.
Although all the recent work on Delangles site is in colour, perhaps the work that appeals to me most strongly is his Périphérie-Périphérique from 1991-1992. All made from an elevated viewpoint, these pictures show the ‘popular’ quarters of the banlieue surrounding the Paris outer ring road. Because of the vibration from the traffic he was unable to work with 4×5 and these are taken with a 6×6 medium format camera; the square format gives the work a tighter composition.
