Silent world Lucie & Simon recently unveiled their impressive new series, Silent World, which they have been working on, with patience and discretion, for the last three years.
“With Silent World, we wanted to transform major cities into unknown imaginary landscapes. We place one or more symbolic characters into these ghostly abandoned cities to stand as the last witnesses of a vanished world. The characters, often children, have come to this place to confront a new world where time is suspended, representing a sign of hope or life. We wanted to invite the viewer to readjust to the world around him, to push him to question our place and role in our relationship to the world and its future.”
Lucie & Simon combined ancient and modern processes to produce the work. An exposure time of several hours makes all moving objects in the image disappear, the same method used by 19th century photographers lacking sufficiently fast cameras. Using a black filter employed by astronomers to prevent overexposure, Lucie & Simon produce an image beyond time. Then they photograph these “classical” images in order to, “capture different elements in a fixed form, characteristic of contemporary photography.” Finally, each image is retouched over the course of three weeks, “in order to give the illusion of immediacy, of a stilled image, stolen from a fantasy world.”
