MARTIN D ́ORGEVAL

Book excerpt: In Martin d'Orgeval's fifth monograph, Découpages, the land lies dry, bleak and deserted. No humans pass through this almost phantasmal and blurred terra incognita, captured in mellow black and white. However, the young Frenchman does not present nightmarish sceneries in his imaginary country. It is just his unmitigated attention to shapes and shades, lines and surfaces that challenges our ingrained viewing habits. Embedded in d'Orgeval's clean but warm encounter with the world's objects, the reader embarks on an exceptional and touching journey to an unknown territory. Through documentary style, in reshaping the landscape into natural processed drawings and "decoupages" (cut-outs), d'Orgeval rediscovers what William Henry Fox Talbot, the English inventor of photography, coined The Pencil of Nature, his famous book from 1844-46, and gives this concept a new existence.