The Space Project: Explore with Vincent Fournier
Sep 26, 2017
Vincent Fournier is a French fine art photographer exploring significant utopian and futuristic stories. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou Paris, or the LVMH contemporary Art collection among others. He is represented in Asia by Hong Kong’s La Galerie.
After being awarded a diploma in both sociology and visual arts, he studied at the National School of Photography in Arles and obtained his diploma in 1997. After several years as creative director and photographer in the advertising and movie industries, he quit to travel the world in 2004.
Space Project is his founding project, and sees Fournier take a world tour of the most emblematic space research centres – think Nasa and Russia’s Star City – which aroused fantasies and strong hopes and expectations of an entire generation. He has strong photographic style: contrasts of scale, sharp architectural composition, precision of the aestheticism, mastery of natural light, interest in paradoxical situations embodying tension and irony.
“With Space Project, I have voluntarily mixed a historic and documentary vision of the spatial adventure with staged situations fed by the cinema and my childhood memories,” says Fournier. “Thus, these mythical places of the space exploration become films sets where Jacques Tati would meet with Jules Verne or Stanley Kubrick. This body of work takes at present a new resonance with the development of new space exploration in the private sector of the aerospace and robotics industry.”
Ultimately Fournier’s images invite us to think about the evolution of the world, our place in it, and our own perception of time. Having grown up with “the end of history” and living in the eternal present, he questions with his images our past and future utopias… What are our expectations for the future and has the future already happened? These works are currently on display at Clervaux, Cite de L’image in Luxembourg until September 29.
This article first appeared in the September 2017 print issue of #legend magazine.
