Photographer Baptiste Deschamps is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Antenna’. To see Baptiste’s body of work, click on any photograph.

The Antenna series highlights the sculptural aspect of telecommunication and astronomy systems. Long exposure times, night shots, and photomontages allow me to erase all traces of human presence. Freed from their context, these technological objects take on a monumental dimension. Both their forms and the evocation of a space-related imagination contributes to a futuristic aesthetic. Beyond their formal aspects, these structures / sculptures / dream machines also serve to visualize an invisible world—the world of waves. From rhythmic symphonies and pulsars to the waves generated by our communications, it is a true cacophony that surrounds us.

Biography:

Born in 1990 in Auvergne, I was trained at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art in Bourges (France).

Currently based in Nantes, I work as an architectural photographer while also pursuing a parallel artistic practice.

My photographs are windows onto a world of industry without people. A counterfactual history where the traces of future human activity erode under the action of the elements: water, sand, time.

Passionate about architecture and futurism, I conceive my images as fragments of an alternative reality.

Outside of time, freed from human presence, artifacts offer us a calm and poetic vision of advanced technology that is already obsolete. In fact, these photos reflect our own condition: a mirror of our aspirations and dreams of a future that continuously slips away as we believe we are getting closer to it.

The concept of territory is central to my research. I am equally interested in the search for places of significance as well as the visual and emotional sensations they evoke. While my approach and framing often approach a documentary style, I occasionally use lighting (at night) or even photomontage techniques to create "illusory" images that overlay multiple temporalities.