This is not a Map is a useless map collection celebrating the meeting of a photographer and a place. “Montalivet” by Hervé Szydlowski comes to enrich this collection published by the French publishing house specializing in photography called Poetry Wanted and founded in 2013 by Rémi Noël .
At the same time as he guides us within the naturist enclosure of Montalivet (Gironde), Hervé Szydlowski abolishes the otherwise solid frontiers of ages and generations and neutralizes the aesthetic canons from which art history reveals infinite, contradictory variations.
Szydlowski achieves the fullness of a philosophical return to a humanity freed from the weight imposed on it by civil or religious societies and, even more, the cult of young and healthy bodies.
The photographer casts over living beings a gaze that apprehends life as a beach of happiness on which no one has the right to impose more or less distinct limits of tolerance.
Hervé Le Goff
ln these nude portraits, there is the idea of a fresco of humanity, with its archetypes and models.
You can also discern the fragility, the dark side of humanity, illness, death … 1 think we come to Montalivet in search of a lost paradise.
We are haunted by this myth and these photos draw on this imaginary.
This Garden of Eden can also be seen as a simulacrum or an utopia whereas consumer society is harassing us with its temptations and surplus.
Montalivet is the foundation of my work, with its portraits of life. Some say it loud and clear, other murmur gently: nobody is afraid of dying at Montalivet, and it might even be a fine thing.
Hell and paradise don’t come into it. lt’s a place where we’re rooted in the moment. And that’s it.
Hervé Szydlowski
INFORMATION
Montalivet #33
Hervé Szydlowski
Texts by Hervé Le Goff
Edition Poetry Wanted
Collection : This is not a map
Format folded map : 11 x 25cm
Format unfolded map : 100 x 155cm
30 B&W photographs
16 euros
http://www.thisisnotamap.com
