Photo of the Week #366

September 8, 2025
This dynamic picture presents a lyrical puzzle, where past and present are merged into an energetic alloy. The image is from a body of work that French photographer Stéphane Couturier exhibited at the Fernand Léger National Museum in 2018. Couturier created this piece 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 this case, a view of the bridges in the Mediterranean port of Sète is interwoven with Léger’s own work. The resulting picture, with the muscular steel girders and dancing hues, has 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.