“Black colour keep only pure light from reality, “this treasure of rays” by Barthes, who told that they keep reaching us after the disappearance of the photographed subject.(...) The picture fills up with the deepness of time and places but in the same time casts a new world. A floating dream ...” Jean-Claude Pondevie

Jean-Claude Pondevie, renowned French architect, studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. His photographs reflect a research of minimalism and composition about landscape and architecture without any point of reference in place nor in time. Through his very cinematographic choices in framing and composing the scene, he focuses on the “off-camera”, on the place in which our reality is located, without documenting it.

The architecture is reduced to abstract forms on which the interplay of light and shadow, and the transparency effects create a feeling of unreality. His black monochrome, reveal, after careful observation, abandoned interiors, landscapes of urban wasteland or desert.

The book “ainsi” (thus), published by Xavier Barral editions, is the first monograph on the photographic work of Jean-Claude Pondevie. A poem by renowned French author Eric Reinhardt responds to the photographs page after page.