Cities are like oceans

I came to photography through travel. ‘It allows you to escape a vision : that of the sterile repetition of places, people and of yourself’ (Franck Michel). Having dreamt of the great tropical forests of the world, I started travelling in cities. This attraction for urban jungles comes from the personal rapport I have with them. As a new-born baby discovers the world, I plunge naked into them, filled with an ‘oceanic feeling’. I then ‘scan’ the city, walk ceaselessly and find my way by cutting the territory up into personal land marks : the traces, links, empty spaces, junctions, edges, heights, complex places… It is wandering, an urban vision without the pretension of being objective, just an extension of my architect’s eye. This work shows the place of human beings in these cities that are increasingly chaotic, and where modernity, dictated by the rule of economics, tends to irrevocably take over traditions that have been established over time. Man as a social being no longer has a place here. Human scale has been reduced to nothing. Man, with an indivualistic future is lost like a drop in the urban ocean. Houses crumble, skyscrapers grow, the ground is filled with urban communication networks. The world marches on. I am trying to find the poetry of fatalism in these cities by putting the human scale into the eternal urban palimpsest. I am always guided by this feeling that links the individual to everything else. The light is that of dawn or dusk, of neon or storms, to dramatise the seemingly unavoidable evolution. Sublime the urban, put enchantment back into reality. Cyrus Cornut