< < Home Return to the thumbnails of Verticales

 

       TEXT IN FRENCH   

 

The Postcard picture is a « Pagnolade » , the one image of a city you’ll never see if you go there. The first time I went to Rome, I was expecting to find a heap of ruins. I was surprised to discover 5 million living people there !
Even if it’s a small provincial French village, the postcard offers a corrupt image. The photographer who lives there has the leisure to choose the most beautiful day of the year, the best light, best angle, ideal, revealing no telephone pole and wires, no TV antennas or the old silo hiding the new warehouse… This is why in my panoramas, I don’t hide the antennas, the high-tension wires or the electric pylons (all these are marvellous foils for my « box of perspectives »), and it is a real pleasure to compose these images with them included. Let’s take advantage of them while they last ! In a few years, the antique dealers will be selling them to us for their weight in gold so that we can exhibit them in our antiseptic gardens and museums.

Christian Ramade

The panorama is a difficult format to use in the city, given that its vocation is to register vast lateral spaces, whereas urban space is encumbered with multiple poles supporting traffic directions, stoplights and streetlights whose verticality will inevitably cut the photo into parts.
Christian Ramade who has undertaken to treat landscape photography in panorama and color, has decided to confront – literally to attack head on, face to face – the difficulty of producing an effect successfully esthetic and if need be semantically fruitful by means of this constraint.

Jean Arrouye