Outwest

Présentation

Christian Lutz stayed at the Davies ranch in Oregon four times between 2006 and 2008. Between Western imagery and consumerist modernity, life on the Davies ranch is photographed as a daily life constantly bordered by tragedy. The set seems too big and the scenes too brutal for those who are not actors in the epic conquest of the West, but farmers at work, mimetic characters of past tales. C. Lutz's photographs, laden with signs, draw a strange dramaturgy, as if dispossessed of the stakes of cinematographic fiction. A static and silent narrative, photography has come to install its geometries, to draw scenes that link men to each other, to the spaces they occupy, and to the photographer.
The strange gravity of these scenes seems to be built on a kind of weightlessness, as if suspended above the great emptiness that the Americans created before reinventing America.