鈥淧hotographs are a way of imprisoning reality鈥ne can鈥檛 possess reality, one can possess images 鈥 one can鈥檛 possess the present but one can possess the past.鈥 Susan Sontag famously posted the value of 鈥渃ollecting鈥 moments through the lens.聽
All photographs are, inherently, framed. They offer a version of reality, as Sontag posits, but not one that we can ever really 鈥減ossess鈥 in all its entirety, devoid of its original perspective. Just as our eyes provide information to be processed by the brain, the lens does the same for the camera. When we adjust the aperture settings and 鈥渋mprison鈥 the light passing through the lens, we capture the particularities of angle, composition, colour and light, projecting an image that is, inherently, finite.聽
Circling these ideas of visual boundaries, margins and fringes are the works of Fabien Dendi茅vel. The photographer extends the concept of the frame, from the eye to the lens and then to a window. From the sandstone buttes of Arizona鈥檚 Monument Valley to the jagged mountains in Iceland, Dendievel鈥檚 subject matter is constrained to a limited view which is always beyond reach. Viewers are invited to fixate, with a kind of passing interest, on towers of red rock, sweeping blue horizons and green shrubs, the size and scale of which are all completely unknown due to the distance that sits between them and the final audience.
Dendi茅vel touches on the act of visual tourism,聽demonstrating a mastering of light and frame.
Credits:
1. Belgrade.
2. Iceland 2.
3. Iceland 1.
4. Iceland 3.
5. Plane.
6. Corsica.
7. Monument Valley 2.
8. Monument Valley 1.
All images courtesy of Fabien Dendi茅vel.
