Ainsi by Jean-Claude Pondevie at Editions Xavier Barral

This book Ainsi, published by Xavier Barral, constitutes the first monograph on the photographic work of Jean-Claude Pondevie, against a poem by Eric Reinhardt, which is slowly dispersed through its pages.

Jean-Claude Pondevie has developed his photographic work over more than ten years, based on landscapes with no identifying geographic or temporal markers. Through these interior and exterior views with cinematic framing, he focuses on “off-screen space”, the space in which our undocumented reality takes place. The architecture is reduced to abstract forms, in which plays of light, shadow, and transparency emerge, creating a feeling of strangeness. In his pared-down compositions, a few elements such as a window, staircase, and ladder, create interludes or narrative fragments in this suspended world. Eric Reinhardt’s words accompany the journey across these landscapes that fuel our imagination.