Photographer Jean-Marc Yersin is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘Downtown’. To see Jean-Marc ’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Made in 1981 during an extended trip to North America, Downtown examines the place of the individual in the city, focusing on their relationship to the built space that surrounds or dominates them.

Beyond the tensions, fractures and even dramas that could be felt, what was most striking was the expression of profound loneliness that marked the faces of passers-by as they strolled through the streets of these cities.

Whether gigantic metropolises or more modest towns, they all had the same backdrops, the same signs, even the same place names in a ‘downtown’ that was copied to the point of boredom from one end of the continent to the other.

BIOGRAPHY

After training in a commercial photography studio in Geneva, Jean-Marc Yersin worked in a variety of fields. In 1981, during a long trip to North America, he produced "Downtown", a reflection on the place of the individual in the American city. 

In 1991, together with his wife, Pascale Bonnard Yersin, an archaeologist, he became director of the Swiss Camera Museum in Vevey, where he was one of the founders of the Images Festival in 1995. After the extension and complete renovation of the museum in 2012, Jean-Marc Yersin was able to gradually resume his own photographic projects, to which he has devoted himself more freely since his retirement in 2018. Through his photographs, he questions the way in which what could be our future remains will be seen by others, in another age. 

This questioning led him to create a kind of atlas of these places in the making, which he published under the title "The sketchbooks from another age", of which five volumes have already been published. These publications have also been the subject of various exhibitions and screenings in Switzerland and France.

In his practice, Jean-Marc Yersin designs and produces all his projects himself, paying particular attention to the materiality of his prints, the layout of his publications and the hanging of his exhibitions. Inspired by the new kinship between inkjet printing and the world of engraving, he has set up his own print shop, where he has developed his own style of black and white prints with very deep inking, even in his large formats.

All images and text © Jean-Marc Yersin