STÉPHANE COUTURIER  Melting Point

From November 9 through January 6th, Laurence Miller Gallery will present STÉPHANE COUTURIER: MELTING POINT, a selection of recent large-scale time-exposure color photographs taken in a Japanese high-tech Toyota factory, north of Paris.

In this series Couturier extends his decades long project of exploring how modern cultures simultaneously construct and destroy. He captures what he has termed the ‘urban archeology’ of cities. Whether through images of demolition or construction, the unique energy and vitality of his photographs accentuate the temporal turbulence of metropolitan areas of the world.

Using a large format camera, and working with a lab technician, Couturier creates crisply detailed prints that expand the viewer’s awareness of how a photograph can look and how urban occurrences can be conceptualized. Each picture is printed from a multiply-exposed color negative, a sandwiching of two moments in time, creating highly abstract yet precisely detailed images as painterly as a de Kooning and as information-filled as a Walker Evans. People, machines, car parts, wires and more all compete for the viewer’s attention—images of industry simultaneously out of control and in perfect harmony.

Stéphane Couturier has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States, including the Lowe Museum of Art, Miami, the Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasborg, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York and the Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge. His photographs are in the collections of the Musee de L’Elysee, Lausanne, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Cleveland Art Museum. In accordance with his most recent series, publisher Ville Ouvret has printed the monograph: Stephane Couturier: Melting Point. His landscape work is currently on exhibit in the International Center for Photography Triennial, Ecotopia, though January 7^th, 2007.