Usine Toyota, Melting Point, Valenciennes, 2005

Following the steps of the German couple Bernd and Hilla Becher (see AV Proyectos 01), Stéphane Couturier (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1957) began his artistic career analyzing the transformations that take place within the urban fabric. In his first work, Urban Archeology, the French photographer uses elements from the city – abandoned facades, places under construction or interstitial spaces – as pictorial tools to document the decay of contemporary heritage. This experimentation around the processes of change evolves throughout the oeuvre of Couturier, reaching its peak in the series titled Melting Point, in which, through multiple long-term exposures, it is possible to visualize the phenomenon of flow, generating images on the boundary between abstraction and detailed representation...[+]