Patrick Tourneboeuf photographs people through what they leave behind them. His work is focused on the memory of places and the memory of men and women who lived in these places.

In the work of the photographer, this new series can be seen as the visual art side of “Nulle Part” (Nowhere), the series about seaside resorts Patrick Tourneboeuf has photographed outside the summer season. These images show streets, urban centres, and beaches once their occupiers have left. The photographs of the series “Blow up” are taken from vintage images, gathered from flea markets of these very holiday locations in France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium. “Blow up”, named after Antonioni’s eponymous movie, recreates a period that belongs to the collective memory.

Patrick Tourneboeuf’s work on the memory of places stands here again. Nevertheless, the visual approach is still far from his previous series : he doesn’t act here as a photographer but as a visual artist working on his reproductions of photographs collected over time.

By zooming, cutting, and cropping, he makes images that reveal and accentuate the paper and print dithering. Despite the old-fashioned impression given by these scenes, his aesthetic choice recall the voyeuristic and indiscreet feature of pixelated pictures from Google maps, extracts of surveillance videos or stolen photographs of sensational magazines.

The exhibition takes you deep into the heart of those pictures; the viewer is seized by their aesthetic connotation that brings nostalgic memories back. But what do you actually see ? The enlargement of the photograph reveals the subject as much as it dissolves it. These familiar scenes, idealised images, are a reflection of your memory and of the construction and transformation process of your recollections.