The Topographic Imaginary: Attending to Place in Contemporary French Photography: 84 (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures)

Since the early 1980s, art photographers from metropolitan France have been training their lenses on ordinary landscapes throughout the country they call home.The Topographic Imaginary is the first book to study this important and flourishing trend.It examines work by artists who meld documentary and creative modes to attune viewers to places that mainstream culture tends to tune out, but which, as Ari J.Blatt argues, are in fact more meaningful than they initially appear.From views of building sites in Paris, peri-urban edgelands, or a tangle of trees in a forest, to those that ponder the play of light and shadow on roadside fields in Normandy or the tacky colors painted on dated village shopfronts, images that signal the emergence of a “topographic turn” in contemporary French photography constitute new ways of seeing and sensing France’s diverse national territory.As Blatt suggests, they also represent a visual laboratory through which to investigate how landscape “scapes” our under