A406, North Circular Road

A406, North Circular Road, 2006-2007
40 photographs

A406, North Circular Road, Bartleby & Co., 2011

On the outskirts of cities, the car is indispensable for getting around. From November 2006 to March 2007, French photographer Benoît Grimbert followed the A406 North Circular Road, which traces a 25.7-mile arc around the northern outskirts of London, from west to east.
The series he produced comprises twenty-four square-format colour views. These were not sweeping panoramas with powerful, dynamic lines. The images show ordinary spaces, captured at eye level; the sky is grey and, in this bland lighting, there are no cast shadows or saturated hues. The series has the sober allure of a regular sampling process —as the concise title suggests: A406 – North Circular Road. The latter not only provides topographical information, but also indicates that the landscapes shown are “vehicular spaces”, in other words, sites that can only be reached by road and are therefore inextricably linked to its presence.
Traffic lanes are omnipresent in the views, sometimes on several levels and combined with railway lines. As for the pedestrian areas, they are most often surrounded by railings or protective barriers: walkers seem to need to be protected from the cars. Vehicles of all kinds populate the photographs, from which humans are virtually eliminated. Vegetation is not absent, however. It appears along sidewalks or in the uncultivated spaces between major thoroughfares. These green areas are littered with garbage and are the antithesis of the hortus conclusus—impure, unsightly, and open to uninterrupted traffic. The sparse housing varies from one view to the next: there are a few blocks of flats, but mostly poor terraced houses... as well as more opulent mansions. Within the spaces depicted by Benoît Grimbert, the urban fabric seems to be stretching and slackening; the route along the A406 allows the artist to examine the threshold where the city gradually breaks up and becomes unstuck.
High-voltage pylons, poles, and lampposts, present throughout these views, form a tight vertical rhythm crossed—more or less at right angles—by the traffic axes. This orthogonal grid echoes the square format of the prints. The gridded, striated spaces appear as areas where existence seems highly constrained. The images feature all kinds of railings, walls, guardrails, fences and barriers: there are limits and boundaries everywhere, impeding pedestrian movement.

Danièle Méaux, “Des espaces véhiculaires”, in Géo-Photographies, Une approche renouvelée des territoires, Filigranes Editions, 2015




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