Azure 2001-03

‘Blue is obscurity becoming visible.’1

Azure is the name given to sky of a deep blue.
It has a specific intensity. It evokes at the same time the horizon, the boundless, the celestial, the radiant, the opaque, the nocturnal and vertigo.
These photographs were taken between night and day, from dusk till dawn, when the effectiveness of our senses undergoes change, and which leads
to a shift from one state to another, from the visible to the invisible, from the palpable to the impalpable.
The places in the photographs are mysterious, approaching the limits of the unfamiliar, and suggest a lunar landscape,
with occasional signs that man has been there.

The panoramic camera is used here for technical reasons. The lens rotating on an axis turns upon itself, its continuous movement across
the area to be photographed records the landscape in the form of multiple exposures.
The long exposure times, from 2 to 6 hours, illustrate the passage of time, moving from day to night to day again.
The 146-degrees rotating-lens, the arc travelled by the lens’s rotation, is close in its range to the field of vision of the human eye.
Seen in an exhibition context and enlarged (2m. long), these images give the viewer the feeling of being absorbed by the colour surface
where shapes appear slowly from the shadows.

1 Gaston Bachelard. Air and Dreams. Translation by Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell. The Dallas Institute Publication. 1988. 170.

Chromogenic prints from colour negatives, 86 x 200 cm