The Photography and Image Theater offers an exhibition dedicated to Stéphane Couturier from June 29 to October 7. Since the early 1990s, Stéphane Couturier’s photographic work has received excellent international recognition.
His images are featured in numerous institutions and collections in France and abroad. He has participated in many group exhibitions worldwide. The Printemps de Cahors in 1996, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg in 1999, the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles in 2001, the National Library of France in 2004, the World Expo in Aichi, Japan in 2005, the Moscow Photo Biennale in 2006, among others, have dedicated solo exhibitions to him. His work was honored with the Niepce Prize in 2003.
Stéphane Couturier has been led to visit major cities and their suburbs. The city, industry, and constructed landscapes are, for him, a means of questioning the relationship between the artwork and the represented subject. This dual aspect — the inseparable documentary investigation and the artistic exploration — characterizes his entire photographic oeuvre.
Since 1994, Stéphane Couturier has worked in series: Urban Archaeology, focusing on urban spaces in transformation, then Generic Cities, Landscaping, and Melting Point, with the first series created in 2005 comprising digital images taken inside the Toyota assembly lines in Valenciennes. Since then, other series have been produced in Chandigarh (India) 2006-2007, Havana 2006-2007, Barcelona 2008, Brasilia 2007-2009, and the Alstom factory in Belfort 2009.
It is on this “Melting Point” theme that a photographic commission at the Marble Palace site in Nice will be carried out. It will be presented for the first time during the exhibition’s inauguration.
