A406, North Circular Road
ENSA Paris-Malaquais
Paris, 2008


In the late 1960s, Douglas Huebler, a representative of the movement known as photoconceptualism, developed the Duration Pieces series. Here, photography borrowed its conceptual aspect from obedience to a precise shooting protocol, fixed not in space, but in time. For Duration Piece # 4, Bradford, Massachusetts, for example, to photograph a playground and the children within it at regular or irregular time intervals, or according to a program established independently of the subject to be photographed and applied with clocklike precision. The point of view thus moves not in space, but in time. The exhibition of the photographs could not be conceived without the simultaneous presentation of the protocol that gave rise to the images produced. Cutting out time in the form of the measurement of duration was to take on the function of a veritable map, where the visible could be located.

The layout of London’s North Circular Road seems to play a similar role for Benoît Grimbert to that of the temporal map for Douglas Huebler. It takes on the role of a landscape rendered abstract by its sole function: to reduce journey times. The fluidity that all ideal “circulation” aims for pre-dates the road’s design and projects its demands onto what already exists. Speed is its horizon, both point of view and vanishing point. To this abstraction of quantified temporal flows, photography opposes its fixing action and offers its storage capacity.

The edges of the frame are razor-sharp, cutting a hole in the landscape that leaks out on all sides, blurred by movement. They halt the flow of time that the high-speed track literally metaphorizes, i.e., according to the etymology of the term, transports. Interrupting the flow, photography contains it as memory, organizes it, proposes a storage modality. We call these different modes images; in reality, they fabricate a place (topos), collected from the requirements of contemporary urbanism.

Here, photography is the term that identifies the image with the place it fabricates. It is the seat of this operation of identification, the time required for this process. It is as a modality of memorial arrangement, that photography, like architecture, can be deposited as a trace of spatial experience and constitute an architectural tool.

Julie Cortella, exhibition text




Exhibitions


What stands between us. Akademie der Künste, Berlin (EMOP Berlin)

2025


Los Angeles revisited (in dialogue with Hannah Darabi) JAP, Entre deux portes, Bruxelles

2025


Horse Latitudes [as part of “Kerstin Flake / Benoît Grimbert” duo show], Fotohof, Salzburg

2024


Atrocity Exhibition, Centre d’art Ygrec / ENSAPC, Aubervilliers

2023


Neuköln “Heroes”, Hôtel la Louisiane / PhotoSaintGermain, Paris

2022


Deux ou trois choses, B.P.I., Centre Pompidou, Paris

2022


Regards du Grand Paris, Magasins Généraux, Pantin

2022


Nuclear Winter, Librairie Mazarine, Paris

2018


Rock’n Roll, Fondation Fernet-Branca, Saint-Louis

2018


Faites vos jeux, 9th Gonesse Biennial of Contemporary Art, Pôle culturel de Coulange

2014



Stains, Archives nationales, Paris

2012


A406, North Circualr Road, ENSA Paris-Malaquais, Paris

2008


Normandie, Paysages de la Reconstruction, CRCO, Cherbourg-Octeville

2006