* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
About “Space Project” (left):
“Space project” is a reflection of Vincent Fournier’s fascination for space. His photographs are allegories and criticism for our dream of a science fiction utopia. Often science fiction describes another future world based upon the world we live in now. Looking at the photographs of the simulated Mars habitat (MDRS) built in a desolate and rocky desert of Utah gives us a feeling of a science fiction movie though all exist for real. It reminds us how the cosmonaut Buzz Aldrin described the lunar landscape in terms of its ‘magnificent desolation”. The ambivalence between fantasy and reality in Vincent Fournier’s photographs confronts the myth of space race with a sense of irony. It appears like a magnificent children’s play provoking a diffusion between waking and dreaming. His ghostly, composed photographs–mysterious, space-suited men walking on a vast desert plain, a researcher quietly sitting in a blindingly white sterile environment, abandoned monitors blinking codes in a simulation room’have an otherworldly, unreal aesthetic. In these fascinating images, Fournier explores the paranoia and darkness of man’s attraction to the disconnect of space.
