Mongolia « Prints. »

Photos
The prints which left of long Soviet years of occupation in Mongolia draw a urban landscape of concrete and dilapidation. The dominant impression is that of a Clerc's Office which would have failed. Strewn in the town of Oulan Bator remain of the marks revealing a last will of hand put of the big Soviet brother on the country: concrete erection in the form of warheads menaçantes, ruins, places monumental and vacuums delivered to the wind, blocks of apartments posed there, everywhere of hard, denying the cultural roots and showing the will to impose the sedentarisation, a cold and sad model urban, quite far away from the wandering tradition is pastoral the Mongolian ones. Traces of this recent past, Mongolian did not make close-cropped table of it.

Emptied hulls of their force symbolic system, they let them derive and break up slowly. Two modes of habitat coexist, the life stages some in concrete blocks for the sedentaries, where the yurt for the nomads. Sometimes stuck to the city or insulated in the steppe, the yurt gives the feeling of a hot belly, a digest of family which accomodates you and in which all is divided. The lifting of the Soviet lead cover also marks the return to the great day of religious enthusiasm. Mysticism swept the rationnalism formerly imposed. Mix boudhism and of shamanism, the rites are festive, sometimes physical, and always loans of mystery.

The infinite one of the landscapes. The infinite one of the landscapes digs a large appetite of space, the irrepressible desire to devour distance. a magnetism which always pushes with going further. The road must be invented, it is not the asphalt ribbon which channels flows and nets the territory. Any growth to be lost. the report/ratio at time, at the distance are scrambled.

Five hours are necessary to cover 100 kilometers, but these 100 kilometers appeared 500 of them, so much the landscapes are varied, the difficult road. With through the pane, the close relation and the distance ravel in the same immediate perception, the environment contains the distance and nothing resists the movement. The progression of the voyage was accompanied by délitement progressive of the landscape, leaving the dense city for its more scattered accesses, until the insulated steppe and its yurts. The voyage thus proceeded like a advance with wrong way to arrive finally at the original nudity of the desert. The chance of the meetings wanted that lje division this discovery of the desert with a sedentarized family, living the city. It is their own vision and lived of the desert which is given to see in each image. Far from apprehendbeing apprehended like a hostile environment, the space of the desert was quickly transformed into place of relaxation, in play-ground out of any dimension, a place where each one could become again a child. The magnet of the light. The landscapes which us avalent, the insuperable distances, the dilution of time, the experiment of Mongolia passes by the loss of the reference marks.

This mislaying is an aubaine for the photographer, but it can be also turned over against him, the glance can be lost. To move, it is necessary to be let guide by the light. Its reading is worth that of all the geographical charts. It is light which magnetizes the glance, which makes it possible to live a space, to choose a place and a suitable moment there. It constitutes a significant anchoring in space and the time of which the ally should be made.

Each image reveals one particular moment of captured light. it acts of the shaving light of the early morning which lengthens the shades and dramatizes space. there is also the fantasmée light of the desert of which one enivre quickly, but also the diffuse and equal light of an interior of coffee, at the end of the afternoon which underlines the softness of the moment which passes. The pallet would be incomplete if one did not evoke the enveloping and vaporous light of the yurt which expresses without similar the hospitality of the Mongolian nomads, while creating a chamanic atmosphere of mystery favourable with the spirits. Until fallen the night the light is not acknowledged not overcome, it goes until infiltrating by effraction to underline of a feature a glance, a gesture and to leave hidden all that does not have to be revealed.