Yvon Lambert has an interest for borders and what they symbolise. Ten year long has he been traveling throughout border crossings. His impressive black & white photographs bring us deep within the historical context behind the scenes.
„The common factor linking all the locations depicted in these photographic stories is that they were or still are home to border crossings.
This roaming, cultivated by the dialogue between the observer and the photographer, is to be viewed and understood as an attempt to associate borders – government-imposed objects – with individual destinies, with the destinies of those who have crossed these borders, been stopped by them, even died at them, like Walter Benjamin. The words of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Peter Handke and several other writers determined the choice of the locations that I captured through my lens.
The first steps of this project were taken during a time when the gradual dismantling of national borders seemed achievable. The last twenty years, however, have once again given rise to a spectacle of at times bloody conflicts within Europe itself. Which explains why some of the photographs contain traces of these events almost without my intention.
These border locations – rather mundane like any other location – feature landscapes and people, and yet there is something mysterious and woefully relevant about them. Georges Perec called them places of disappearance.“
This photographic series was developed between 1989 and 2009.
Born in 1955 in Luxembourg. He lives and works in Luxembourg and is represented by the Agence Vu in Paris. Starting as a technical engineer in the iron and steel industry, he then studied photography in Brussels. He realizes some series on orders from foreign ministries and cultural institutions, national and international. He regularly works on the theme of borders in Europe, which counts as an award-winning project at the “Grand Prix of the City of Vevey” in 1995. His photographs are displayed all over the world.
The exhibition is part of the new photographic season 2017 – 2018 by Clervaux – cité de l’image
The relationship to reality is marked not just by opposites but by subtle nuances. The unambiguous opposition of black and white gives rise to a vague inkling: there is more, something more complex, different shades. Contemporary photography makes no exception, both in its artistic mission and in its documentary approach.
The first rupture occurs on the surface, before travelling down to deeper levels and layers. In the window of the photographer’s eye, everything is alive, the foreground as well as the background. Like waves rolling into one another, nuances merge together in favour of the uncertain, in favour of plurality. Blurring the borders. Everything shining in the light. Everything shimmering in the shade.
The new season of photographic images is based on multiple truths, straddling day and night, capturing the entire range of black and white colours.
Read more at www.clervauximage.lu
Information
Clervaux - cité de l'image / Jardin du Bra’haus II
Montée du Château, Clervaux, Luxembourg
September 19, 2017 to September 18, 2018
