“Distress” is the culmination of a dive of more than thirty years in a deeply battered United Kingdom.
This description of the human condition, of its endless frustrations, between boredom and resignation, updates the deep injustices which, throughout the 20th century, plunged the European peoples into an endless tragedy.
Yesterday, the denial of their humanist values by the European nations, blinded by fear, has precipitated many of them into totalitarian abjection.
Today, human distress remains, whatever its face – loneliness, exclusion, unemployment, racism, anti-Semitism – a real threat to the community when a tiny number of people access knowledge, leaving the majority in darkness. and contempt.
Stéphane Duroy, December 2010
“He first started as a press photographer, Stéphane Duroy gradually then moved away from the media to develop his personal projects that he finalizes in books and exhibitions. He photographed little, with a great economy of means and a subtle and unaffected treatment of color (which he mixed with black and white) to explore Europe of the 20th century marked by two atrocious wars whose memory he questions.
When he was a reporter, he devoted himself particularly to two territories, Berlin and Great Britain; he has drawn an in-depth portrait of it, constantly wary of the clichés to restore the complexity of the situations and the diversity of spaces too often reduced to conventions close to the postcard.
His career in Europe is marked by a dull tone, serious but without pathos, which installs a time from which the anecdote is absolutely excluded to give way to a form of desolation. His feeling of a painful past on which the present is based compels us to worry.
Each image is moved by an inner necessity, a deep and disillusioned reflection on the meaning of a story in which man does not learn from the horrors he has committed or of which he has been an accomplice.
The calm and determination that underpins the subject impose both a thought and a visual approach. Tense between the moment of the shooting and the fact that it is confronted with history, photography seems to redefine our conception of temporality.
Pursuing a documentary and conceptual approach, his work establishes a disillusioned view of the 20th century and its contemporary consequences. ”
Christian Caujolle
Stéphane Duroy – Distress
Festival Photographique l’Œil Urbain
April 5 – May 19
Corbeil-Essonnes
