Erwan Morère — Wildside — Les filles du calvaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 4, 2013 → January 11, 2014

Erwan Morère favours very dense black and whites and a relative opacity that obstructs the eye, contradicting what is usually taught to young contemporary photographers. He even sometimes plays with blurry images that one can barely read. Intensely grained, the photographs’ contrasts are pushed to their very limits. Erwan Morère doesn’t seem to edit his images, beyond its framing choices, the printing process — on a baryta paper that highlights their contrasts or on a mat paper saturating the blacks.

Everything depends on the shooting, in the sense that it is reality itself and the context he works in that cast doubts on our capability of analysing the peculiar emotions we feel. In some images, one has difficulties understanding if it is a drawing or a parcel of reality, in so far as the print’s quality is always confusing. Their surfaces are altered as if the extreme climates of the countries he roamed had damaged the films. Strömholm or Petersen seem to have influences his photographic style based on similar contrasted black and whites, dense grain and always taking the opposite view to usual composition lines.

This kind of very personal photographic writing is not recent in Erwan Morère’s work: it was already the case in his shots of Mongolia or Iceland, for example, in images that are never related to documentary photography, even though he travels a lot. He brings back movies from several countries but they rarely talk about the places he visited and the people he met. Settings and situations sit on the verge of an imaginary world. His frontal shots of mountains or landscapes with flat tints are subtly composed in layers that create a visual effect and erase perspective as well as our cognitive perception of the sky, the ground or the sea.