“Having started skateboarding in the late eighties, I cannot help seeing the city and its forms as an infinite playground – one eye constantly observing all the architectural forms. Steps cease to be steps, handrails cease to be handrails, sidewalks cease to be sidewalks. They all become abstract forms open to reinterpretation: they can be perceived as ready-made sculptures, or equally as an inventory of skateable forms. In 2006, I spontaneously started taking photographs of architectural spaces that skaters could use. I soon realised that the most accomplished pictures recall specific codes of skateboarding photography. Their focus, lighting, and perspectives are arranged to magnify the space where the action is taking place,” Pierre Descamps says. Richard Leydier, Chief Editor of The Art Press Review, writes in his text contribution for this book: “The photographs in this book signify an inversed movement. They are images, yet they ‘capture’ real spots, just like wild animals depicted on a safari in earlier times – and Descamps is indeed on a hunt. Tracing these sites requires constant alertness. Observing these photographs in a series reveals their striking uniformity: all of them could originate from the same city. This continuity not only reflects the precision of the artist’s original vision, but also reveals the monotony in the conceiving of modern cities which overlooks local character. Most of these images depict angles and slopes that subject the viewer to the possibilities of gravity and the speed it can generate. Their composition is truly elaborate, thoroughly ‘graphic’. With their ramps, steps, and railings, these photographs portray an unexpected richness to the city seen from a skater’s point of view. Being an artist, Descamps knows that this perspective is essentially sculptural.” Iain Borden, Professor of Architecture & Urban Culture at The Bartlett – University College London, states: “Pierre Descamps’s photographs cannot easily be classified as monuments, for, although they may be intentional creations by the photographer himself, as depictions of everyday urban objects surely they do not reveal anything that is deliberately and historically meaningful? A simple ledge, for example, was not designed to be a record of any historic act. So what is the modern perception of urban architecture which Descamps’s work invokes? Perhaps most obviously, Descamps focuses on those parts of architecture which are favoured by street-based skateboarders: those quotidian, often ignored, seemingly banal parts of the city landscape which we normally take for granted. These monuments are not famous or large, but anonymous and small. Descamps’s photographs disclose monuments of contemporary urbanism. Everyday, immersive and contemplative, while also marked with the time of the past and that which is still to come. These are monuments of an everyday world.”weiterlesen