TSCHERNOBYL FOREVER / ALLEMAND

Photo: Patrick Chapuis - 2012
THE AUTHOR
Alain-Gilles Bastide
(...) His investigations are focused on the relationship between images
and texts and the animation of still images. Serge Daney, in the «Libération»
daily newspaper, described his work as a new photographic language,
in which the scale and space variations, the relationships between
images, texts and layout, the «absent» image, the rhythm… become
arranged in the form of an original proposal and set out a new relationship
between photography-text-graphism and cinema.
“Photo-poetry” -a wide-ranging activity that fosters the association of supposedly
heterogeneous forms and practices- is the driving force of this
work. With his first feature report (AMOCO-CADIZ -1978), «La marée
était en noir», he signed publications all over the world. His second report
about the explosion of the «IXTOC-ONE» oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico
(1979) was designed like a travelogue, «Le rêve en bleu d’Esteban».
The critics speak of “a book that burns the platforms» (ZOOM) and his
images are taken up and published by Paris-Match and journals in many
countries.
He went to Chernobyl in 2005 to finalize an auteur report on the topic of
«Traces». The Memorial he achieved in Belarus to pay a tribute to the
700 villages that have been buried after the disaster opened the European
exhibition «Once upon a time… Chernobyl» (2006), organized by the
CCCB (Barcelona) on the 20th anniversary of the explosion of the reactor.
(…)
Jean-Pierre Dupuy