Erwin Wurm – Self-Portrait as 47 Pickles

Douglas Mandry explores the photographic medium in the age of digitization and the technological acceleration that follows. Still using analog processes, his interventions on the image are done by hand, either by applying different historical photographic processes, or by physically cutting and pasting them. For the Unseen Sights series that makes up the book Equivalences, the Swiss photographer was inspired by early 20ᵉ century Middle Eastern postcards, and colored large format black and white prints of landscapes in Cappadocia, Turkey, using acrylic and airbrush. These compositions then being rephotographed. Rather than reproducing these images, the book is a pretext for another interpretation. By playing with the layers of color in the print, the artist creates a new machine-generated representation, a mechanical intervention this time. The original images merge with those transformed and sketch a sequence claiming non-narration. Its title pays homage to Stieglitz's famous "Equivalents" series of vertically shot images of pieces of sky and clouds, known as the first series of abstract photographs. Douglas Mandry is a young Swiss photographer. A 2013 graduate of Ecal, he combines his photography practice with plastic reflection. By mixing visual elements and color, Douglas creates images that lie between art, sculpture and still life.

The book Soulèvements is the continuation of a vast photographic project related to the history of science and theories of the formation of the Earth. Originally inspired by the ancient discoveries that revealed the presence of fossils on the top of mountains, the series Soulèvements is the result of a reflection on the interpretations that have been made over the centuries, based on the observations of these fossils. Based in part on the imaginary, Soulèvements is a reinvention of scientific representations of the formation of the Earth's reliefs and the movements of the mountains revealing a form of choreography of the landscape. Composed from an installation of thirty mirrors, each of the photographs sculpts the space and the landscape challenging the viewer's gaze and his imagination. Not as a simple edition of photographs, the book is built as a mirror of the process of creation of the work, revealing the details, the materiality of the supports, the mechanisms, and interprets the theoretical research underlying the images. The book is composed of a large-format edition exposing the photographs in all their details and an independent booklet. Slipped into the book, this booklet mixes a scientific iconography, images of documentation of the shots and a text by Emma Lewis emphasizing the theoretical and scientific process that accompanies the artist's project.