Photographer JEAN BERNARD SOUDERES is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of these images. From the series ‘Landscape’. To see JEAN’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Photography, a life journey.

To begin a chronology of my photo-biography, I chose the year 1982 and my series of photographs Ombres. I had just completely emptied an apartment where I had lived as a child and young adolescent. There were no more objects, nothing in this place, which thus seemed even bigger than it was. Equipped with my camera and a tripod, I wanted to take black-and-white "souvenir images" of this place; and it was on the white walls that everything happened before my eyes. By projection, external elements came to spread out in shadow, indistinct shapes representing nothing other than themselves. In fact, without having thought about it and therefore unable to formulate it, I was already in the process of taking samples of traces. Forty years of life with photography, a passion devoted to permanent experience for an undisciplined art. The desire to experiment with the photographic act and its multiple possibilities of re-presentations. I never stop producing and planning, the trace always preoccupies me.

I decided to go and look in another territory, that of the bank of different small rivers and canals.
It is along a small canal parallel to the Rhone at the height of Aramon (Gard) that through my observations, reflections, and some shots of the landscape of the opposite bank that I discovered the pictorial richness of the place, the look focused on this edge of water and vegetation rooted on the bank. Here again it is about materials, colors, shapes, and light that will inspire my photographic approach. By bringing the same rigor in the composition, the same attention to the traces that suggest a preceding event, continue the reflection about reality and fiction and their connivance. I decided to do a day of scouting on foot in the Camargue. I was convinced that it would be on this vast territory - wetland - that I would find the greatest diversity of watercourses, uses, vegetation, dimensions.
Wetlands are transition zones between dry land and open water, one of the richest territories for biodiversity regardless of its location and as long as they are not polluted. I imagine the realization of this subject in several months. See the banks in all weathers and their lights, take the time to pay precise attention to the photo, video and sound recordings, in search of traces of life of this biodiversity that coexist on this strip of land and water.
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All images and text © JEAN BERNARD SOUDERES