Photo of the Week #366
Stéphane Couturier
Les Nouveaux Constructeurs (The New Builders) is a body of work that French photographer Stéphane Couturier exhibited at the Fernand Léger National Museum in 2018. The series was created as an homage to Leger’s large-scale work Les Constructeurs (The Builders), which Léger conceived of as a tribute to France’s working class during the Machine Age, and the overall impulse to build and innovate, throughout the arc of human history.
Couturier employs a working method that he developed for his previous Melting Point series, where he digitally combines two images. In these pictures, views of the bridges in the Mediterranean port of Sète are interwoven with Léger’s own work. The resulting images, with the interplay between the muscular steel girders and light dancing hues, have all the verve and color of the best modernist French painting. Couturier's process of photo combination also brings to mind the Constructivist photocollages of Aleksander Rodchenko who, like Léger, celebrated the speed and vitality of the Technological Revolution.
By juxtaposing Léger’s visual language with his own image of one of France’s largest modern-day cargo ports, Couturier frames contemporary globalization within modernism's optimistic embrace of the Machine Age. The resulting image depicts a human drive to grow and create that always dazzles in its scope.
Born in 1957 in Neuilly sur Seine, Stéphane Couturier currently lives and works in Paris.
In 2005 Couturier initiated his Melting Point body of work, which used image editing software to create dazzling photocollages. This series included a group of pictures focused on the Indian city of Chandigarh built by Le Corbusier, which combines the modernist artchtecture of Chandigarh with Le Corbusier's vibrant murals. His series Les Nouveaux Constructeurs, created for the Fernand Léger National Museum in the southeast of France, extends this process by recontextualizing the work of Fernand Léger with the bustling Mediterranean port of Sète.