Following a collective review of the submissions received, the jury selected the project Nord-Ouest, proposed by photographer Pascal Amoyel.
For nearly ten years, Pascal Amoyel (b. 1977) has been working on projects focusing on France, whether on a national scale (Levés d’Ouest), a local scale (Saint-Gaudens), or at the level of a neighbourhood (Rebberg).
Based in Bellême, in the Orne department, Pascal Amoyel has been photographing life in the countryside for the past two years and, as he puts it, seeks “to capture the forms it takes. To see how people live there.” Entitled Nord-Ouest, the project, shot in black and white, aims to document the contemporary experience of these rural areas, “a hybridisation of agricultural land, developed natural spaces, villages and small towns, roundabouts, and peri-urban areas, foremost among which are commercial and industrial zones”. The photographer continues: “Anyone living in the countryside today inevitably experiences this motley mix, between these places that are so different and yet so closely linked by the effects of the boundary, where they merge without one always being able to determine exactly where one is.”
In this fragmented landscape, where traditional social ties have largely unravelled, I go where people gather and continue, temporarily, to form a community, seeking together a sense of freedom and openness: along riverbanks and at places of worship, at car boot sales, in cafés, and at skateparks. I take photographs on country roads and village lanes, in deserted town centres and on the outskirts of sub-prefectures, in shopping centre car parks and those of fast-food outlets. I photograph farms, in stations, on trains, at bus stops—all essential stops for those without a car. And the indispensable car, with its faltering world. I photograph these places because they form the landscape inhabited by people. This work in progress thus documents a region struck by a succession of economic, demographic and social crises, whilst showing the life that persists there.”
Pascal Amoyel’s work, produced using large-format and medium-format cameras, draws on the apparent transparency of the photographic medium to delicately transform the territory into a photographic space where representations and prejudices are set in motion once more, in order to construct, with photography and through photography, a unique and contemporary national landscape. He claims an affinity with the 19th-century French documentary tradition and that of the lyrical documentary pioneered by Walker Evans.
Pascal Amoyel is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure de la photographie (Arles) and holds a Master’s degree in contemporary history (Paris 1 Sorbonne). His work has been shown in group exhibitions (De l’inconstance de la mélopée, Centre d’art Chapelle Saint-Jacques, Saint-Gaudens, 2018; Paysages Français (1984–2017), Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2017) and solo exhibitions (Tant que durera notre heure, Librairie du Palais, Arles, 2020; NOT ALL REBBERG, Mulhouse Photography Biennale, 2016).
