Overshoot #10 – Alexandre Dupeyron

Yogan Muller: Alexandre, we met at Approche, an unbiased images truthful in Paris in November 2024, the place your gallery Le Point du Jour Agnès B offered your sequence on the fires that scorched SW France in summer time 2022, which led to a residency on the Rocky Mountain Research Station and Fire Lab in Missoula. What new views did you acquire from this residency?

Alexandre Dupeyron: My collaboration with the scientists on the Rocky Mountain Research Station and the Fire Lab was a elementary turning level in my follow. I’m deeply grateful for his or her openness.

The residency was a complete immersion into the scientific rigor of finding out wildfires, a topic that I’ve been engaged on since my time in Australia in 2019. It gave me loads of enter and likewise loads of materials that, as a photographer, I’d not have been capable of get anyplace else.

Digging into the archives on the Manitou Experimental Forest Center was a very shifting expertise. It confirmed my perception that artists and scientists usually vibe on the identical frequency, looking out for a similar truths with an equal sense of obsession. This dialogue has been important to my course of. It allowed me to maneuver past merely witnessing the charred stays of a panorama and as an alternative start to map the invisible structure of wildfires and grapple with their unpredictable nature.

This residency was a catalyst for a brand new, hybrid methodology to look at this international problem in a concentrated approach.

Yogan Muller: Your work examines the human situation in giant cities utilizing allegorical, dreamlike fictions slightly than straight documentary images. Why did you select to maneuver away from easy, indexical black-and-white images?

Alexandre Dupeyron: I began out as a photojournalist, so I used to be very a lot after objectivity. That is certainly one thing you’re attempting to realize as a photojournalist, nevertheless it all the time left me questioning whether or not we as photographers can ever obtain objectivity.

Black-and-white images permits me to take a little bit of distance from actuality as a result of, to me, black-and-white is extra akin to what we see whereas I’m dreaming. On high of that, I take advantage of movement blur to create much more distance from actuality to lastly attain a stage of abstraction. That leaves more room to the viewer to create their very own studying of my work.

My images is extra linked to emotions. It is extra suggestive than revealing.

Yogan Muller: Motion blur is central to your course of. As a end result, your photos exude fragility and transience. I’m curious to know what you’re attempting to seize.

Alexandre Dupeyron: It has to do with serendipity.

I’ve been sporting glasses since my early childhood. From an early age on, I seemed on the world from two completely different views.

To me, the digicam is a captivating device that stretches time and matter, permitting me to entry a dimension of notion that continues to be past my full management, one thing nearly sacred.

I’ve a approach of capturing photos that’s nearly like dancing. I’m attempting to hook up with issues which might be all the time shifting. When I’m photographing, I attempt to synchronize with the world that surrounds and engulfs me. By doing so, I’m continuously shocked by what I encounter and {photograph}. Other moments of awe happen once I develop rolls of movie and are available to print my photos.

I’ve been perfecting the right printing method that immediately serves this fashion of photographing. In 2019, I got here throughout the gum printing course of, a really old-school and conventional printing course of. It is an easy course of in concept, but it’s additionally very versatile and really tough to grasp. When I’m printing, I let the unknown come out on me without warning.

Yogan Muller: The future is a recurring topic in your work. Tell us about working with this vital theme.

Alexandre Dupeyron: The future is unpredictable and engaging to me. By observing the world we’re dwelling in, there are indicators and clues about the place we’re collectively heading.

In 2010, I moved to Singapore after dwelling in Morocco. I lived there for 2 years. Singapore is among the world’s most superior megacities, and arriving there felt as if I had taken a sudden leap into the long run.

After shifting there, I instantly sensed that the hyper-urban panorama I noticed and photographed was finally going to take over your complete planet. It felt as if we have been endlessly operating after one thing that was in the end going to devour us, without end. That’s why I known as the sequence Runners of the Future (2010-2018). Ultimately, the venture grew to become a single, unified dystopian metaphor of a generic megacity.

Another sequence that attracts on the long run fairly actually is Ashes of the Future (2020-2025). As I discussed earlier, what actually fascinates me about hearth is that it’s each a destroying and creating pressure. Fire, to me, creates the right circumstances for the long run to sprout. There are particular vegetation, for instance, that want hearth to bloom and blossom. You may say that to destroy is to create, and the long run has its personal creating pressure.

Yogan Muller: It’s fascinating as a result of we simply talked in regards to the future, however your course of makes use of older photographic and printmaking processes, similar to gum prints. What inventive freedom have you ever discovered within the analog world?

Alexandre Dupeyron: The method goes again to Pictorialism. It sits precisely between portray and images, and it has loads of plasticity. You can wholly change and reinterpret an image. You can utterly disrupt present colours.

The sequence known as HAPAX (2024), which is a part of Ashes of the Future, is once I first experimented with shade gum printing. Essentially, gum printing is an iterative course of that mixes a number of pigment passes that in the end type the complete chromatic spectrum of the image. So once I print, there are 4 distinct passes: yellow, cyan, magenta, and black. In between every move, I take advantage of a pencil and water to change sure elements of my image. By doing so, I can affect the ultimate shade steadiness. But once more, I can not absolutely management the ultimate end result. Not with the ability to management issues utterly is one thing that infuses my total photographic course of, from photographing to gum-printing them.

There is another factor I like about gum printing, one thing I’m unable to do with any up to date printing method. Gum bichromate is a pigment primarily based course of, so I could make my very own customized pigment formulation. In the sequence known as Pinus Pinaster (2023), I didn’t simply need to {photograph} the “tree cookies” (the cross sections of burnt pines from the 2022 fires). I wished the prints to truly be the fireplace by growing a customized pigment utilizing soot collected from the burned bark of these very timber. The ensuing print is not only a report of the local weather disaster: it’s bodily composed of the catastrophe itself.

Yogan Muller: Now, inform us about your present venture known as Dysnomia and your investigations into mixing images and music.

Alexandre Dupeyron: The identify Dysnomia operates on a number of ranges. Astronomically, it’s the moon of the dwarf planet Eris. In Greek mythology, Dysnomia is the goddess of anarchy and chaos, which actually echoes a few of my previous sequence. And lastly, medically, dysnomia is a type of aphasia, the shortcoming to seek out the precise phrase for a well-recognized object. This “trouble of naming” completely echoes the questions driving my work: What is true? Is actuality what my eyes see, or what the digicam permits me to see?

But again to the venture itself. When I used to be engaged on my first photobook, which was initially designed to current my Runners of the Future sequence, I grew to become sad with the place I used to be going, though this sequence was fairly straightforward to put out in a ebook. But I wished my first photobook to realize one thing extra bold, to change into a whole conceptual system.

It dawned on me, with the assistance of my editor, that the works I had beforehand accomplished have been all linked. So I flipped again and went by all my works in the hunt for a throughline. I wanted a bigger structure to carry them collectively. This is how Dysnomia was born.

Dysnomia is a journey that goes from the unique matter (the primordial bricks intrinsic to every part on Earth) to modernity’s hyperobjects and loops again to matter. Hence, a cloud or a chunk of bark turns into uncooked matter caught between two states.

Narratively, Dysnomia maps an unlimited cycle. It is structured round three ontological questions: Where will we come from? What are we? Where are we going? The journey opens with primordial matter representing creation. It then jumps into the frenetic, crushing tempo of modernity, notably utilizing my Runners of the Future archives. Finally, it loops again to the earth by my Mondes Oubliés sequence, the place I search for human shapes hidden in pure types.

Yogan Muller: Harkening again to your investigations in mixing music and images, inform us in a couple of phrases what you’ve been as much as.

Alexandre Dupeyron: To me, images is musical. When I shoot, it’s all about rhythm, tempo, and shifting by area.

I began mixing images and music about ten years in the past with my shut buddy, the bassist and composer Thomas Julienne.

At that point, although, I used to be projecting my photographs in a slideshow. It was too predictable. Also, I used to be all the time very annoyed as a result of my materials was caught up to now and was fastened. Unlike musicians, I couldn’t improvise and create new interpretations within the second. So this frustration led me to discover a language and setting impressed by VJing that put my photos into movement once more.

This is how the efficiency Dysnomia Live was born. I wished to free the photographs from the static pages of a ebook or exhibition partitions.

I constructed a system that enabled me to venture and manipulate my archives dwell on stage. Now, I play photos like an instrument utilizing morphing and crossfades. It appears like a dwell model of my gum printing course of. Instead of layering bodily pigments in a darkroom, I’m layering mild and time. New photos emerge out of this dwell course of and exist as ephemeral impressions.

Because it has improvisation, each efficiency permits Dysnomia Live to develop and evolve. I additionally love the concept of retaining the venture open to different inventive types. In 2024, we carried out with the painter Yann Chatelin in Bordeaux and with the FANGLAO dance firm, directed by choreographer Olé Khamchala, in Laos.

I’m thrilled to announce that Thomas Julienne and I are 2025 laureates of the Villa Albertine Artist Grant. Thanks to this grant, we’re coming to New York City to play a totally new model of the present at Pioneer Works. Stay tuned, it will likely be in mid-September 2026.

Yogan Muller: What does photographing in a warming world imply to you?

Alexandre Dupeyron: I’ll return to my definition of being an artist.

We have a political place and duty in direction of the world. If there’s one purpose we’re right here, it’s to pressure a pause, to make folks assume, and provide them to take a aspect step from their fast-paced every day lives. We create areas the place they will dream, assume, and really ponder the phenomena which might be quietly shaping our existence.

In a warming world, an artist can not simply be a passive observer. Our function is to attract consideration to the slow-burning ecological disaster we face, giving it emotional and poetic weight.