OPEN FIELDS

For the « Open Fields » project I wanted to work on the concept of territory as a space and the photographic act itself. Performed with a 4x5inch camera and 6×7 medium format the serie questioning the landscape representation and the notion of his capture with a mirror measuring 80x120cm (31,5×47,2 inches) and placed in situ. The mirror here is a way to explore the limits of the photographic frame by the recursive image and multiple compositions lead by the mirror. Photography is a window on the world and it is the rectangle of the photographic frame, of the window, which transforms the "outside" into landscape. - Guillaume Amat - The story is told that the gods allowed Orpheus to enter the underworld and return with his dead wife Eurydice to the world of the living. However there was one condition; that she should follow behind Orpheus and he should not turn around to look at Eurydice until she left the underworld and was in the light. Reaching the entrance Orpheus could not resist looking back at Eurydice, she was drawn back into the underworld and vanished before his eyes. The moral of this myth is never look back to the past, but always look forward to the future. The story also articulates the limitations of the human body, with one pair of eyes you can only look in one direction at the same time. However technology has changed this. With the aid of the camera you can look in many different directions at once, and with the photographic image you look back into the past. With the use of the camera and a mirror Guillaume Amat has made photographic images that simultaneously look forward and backwoods. They create a strange dream like landscape where buildings and figures float in the center of the picture and suggest that he has two sets of eyes, both at the front and back of his head. Orpheus would have been impressed. - Paul Wombell, curator and artistic director -