Normandie
Normandie, 2005-2006
48 photographs
In 2005, Benoît Grimbert travelled the length and breadth of Normandy over a six-month period (1), guided by the directory of sites drawn up in the 1950s by the Ministry of Reconstruction and Urban Planning (MRU), some of which had been photographed in their time. However, this was by no means a retracing of the past, but rather a focus on contemporary urban landscapes. Benoît Grimbert’s work is not about emblematic buildings of the period, or even about architecture. Rather, it deals with the presence, whether obvious or discreet, of Reconstruction across the Normandy territory, from villages to regional capitals.
Such an undertaking involves the consideration of a visible historical reality, without presenting it in a spectacular way. In the form of selected works, it is accessible to everyone, in principle and in variation, if only because of the questions it raises. This work illustrates the memory of a past that is probably not deemed to be worth preserving.
Benoît Grimbert’s “documentary style” does not reproduce in abstracto that of its great inventors, as it applies to a specific territory. While his eye-level framing, equal distance, and even light connect him to this tradition, the absence of frontality and his non-dogmatic contextualization tend to distance him from it; the obliques that structure the images, the solids and voids they bring together, and the elements—churches, housing estates, houses of various types, “free” or built spaces—that they associate are opposed to notions of typology or even surveying.
Nevertheless, the choice of a constant shooting device to dispense with subjective effects emphasizes the notion of the series. The foreground—generally a street or road—keeps the object at a distance, or more precisely, forms a kind of promontory from which an urban structure appears, in “layered” or contrasting fashion. The cars are there as (untroublesome) witnesses of the inhabitants or passersby, who can be glimpsed in some of the images. Benoît Grimbert suggests neither narration nor sociology. The repetition he modulates suggests an everyday quality that is sufficiently neutral for everyone to live their own lives within it, as well as the muted insistence of the social history in which individuals are caught up.
(1) At the invitation of the Centre régional de la photographie de Cherbourg-Octeville, now Le Point du Jour, and the Pôle Image Haute-Normandie (Rouen).