Teo Becher

le bec en l'air

Charbon blanc

30,00 €

2021

Format 24x30

108 pages

French English

978-2-36744-155-9

Présentation

The Maurienne valley, in the French Alps, presents a mastered and largely exploited landscape, marked by the ambiguities and contradictions inherited from its industrial history. The torrent of the Arc, which runs through it, was indeed conducive to the development of the aluminum industry, by its ability to supply the factories with hydroelectricity. Known as the « aluminum valley », it is bordered by a freeway and soon by a high-speed train line between Lyon and Turin, a project however tainted by suspicions of corruption and environmental damage. Despite a few winter sports resorts, most of the space in the Maurienne is nevertheless uninhabitable, conjuring up the romantic image of a pure and sublime nature.

In Charbon blanc, a patient documentary work carried out on this territory between 2016 and 2019, photographer Teo Becher combines two complementary image regimes. Faithful to a conception of photography inseparable from a wandering within a defined space, he begins by physically experiencing the Maurienne landscape: being in the mountain, walking there, breathing there, as close as possible to the topography, to the point where this « uninhabitable » mountain becomes a central character in his book.
In parallel, influenced by the thought of Philippe Descola, for whom nature is a cultural construction and therefore the difference between nature and culture a nonsense, and by Donna J. Haraway’s reflections on the Anthropocene, Teo Becher sought to photograph this moment when landscape and traces of human activity meet, in a relationship of interdependence rather than of opposition.