Photographer Patrice Picard is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of these images. From the series ‘The Port of Rouen, on a Sunday in July’. To see Patrice’s body of work, click on any photograph.
The Port of Rouen on the river Seine is Europe’s number one port for grain export. And yet, on that July Sunday afternoon, it looked deserted, a playground for bold weeds overgrowing the slopes along the connecting roads or the backyards of warehouses. It looked as if man, after building these huge structures, had left, and this — momentary — desertion brought out a strangely beautiful landscape, designed by man and yet from which he had slipped away. As I strolled around this ghostly scenery, my eyes were drawn to the sort of tensions I’m interested in revealing in my work: between man and nature, production and chaos, structure and exuberance.
About Patrice After practicing photography as a hobby since my teenage years, I bought a digital camera ten years ago and set out on new ground, with a different approach. The works of such photographers as Stephen Shore, Lewis Baltz, Alexander Gronsky, Eugène Atget, Raymond Depardon, Philippe Bazin or Thibault Cuisset have deeply inspired and stimulated me over the past years. My own work has developed around several topics: urban landscape, rural landscape, industrial architecture, but also all the small things that are around us and which we tend to ignore as they seem trivial, outdated or discarded. My eyes are drawn to these objects or places on the margins of our daily experience because, to me, they feel like points of high intensity. I envisage each shot in terms of color and frame, and I remove as much as possible of the superfluous and the anecdotal in order to try and picture the essence of what appears to us. To me, a good picture is self-evident and at the same time delivers complexity; it reveals tensions at work in our environment, generated by frictions or oppositions between past and present, creation and decay, production and desertion, presence and effacement, or wild and domesticated nature. This web of interplays is what gives me a feeling of highly saturated life in the subjects I capture.
All images and text © Patrice Picard
See also:
Lambiotte Factories, Coal Memory
By Patrice Picard
Edge of Humanity Magazine’s
FREE Projects & Other Services
To Promote Works From Artists,
Photographers, Poets & Writers
PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK, SHORT STORIES & MUSIC Recommendations
FREE Platform For Artists NO MIDDLEMAN ART GALLERY
Open Submissions for Writers & Poets
Edge of Humanity Magazine is an independent nondiscriminatory platform that has no religious, political, financial, or social affiliations.
We are committed to publishing the human condition, the raw diverse global entanglement, with total impartiality.
Also From Edge of Humanity Magazine
By Edge of Humanity Magazine
Poetry BLOG By Edge of Humanity Magazine
CONTRACT FREE
online platform for artists to sell their creations
Support This Small Independent Magazine
Please
Follow Edge of Humanity Magazine
Email Subscriptions
WordPress Bloggers
Follow Edge of Humanity Magazine on WordPress.com
Not on WordPress?
Don’t Forget to add
to your reader or bookmarks
Thank you!
Oh, wow! Rouen is such a charming and wonderful place, and yet I didn’t know the port. The full set of pictures is spectacular, and shows an entirely different side of the Rouen than I’ve seen there, having only been ‘out on the loose’ in the evenings for dinner after all-day meetings at our offices in nearby Le Trait. Great work, Patrice Picard! Your images highlight for me how very diverse a place can be.