"To photograph is to engage in a chase against erasure, disappearance, nothingness. It's a fight against time, a challenge to oblivion.
(...) It is an unstoppable weapon against cultural genocide or voluntary abandonment; the antidote to passivity."
Jean-Claude Gautrand was only 24 when he discovered the work of German photographer Otto Steinert, founder of "Subjektive Fotografie" and adept at formal rigor bordering on abstraction. For the young Gautrand, it was a real aesthetic shock. From then on, he never ceased to develop a poetry through images, where graphics, matter and light are the essential components of a fundamentally committed body of work. Marked as much by the traces of a bygone era as by the way man perpetually transforms his environment, Jean-Claude Gautrand has witnessed the upheavals and injustices of his time. From the construction of the Paris ring road to the destruction of Les Halles de Baltard, from the ecological disaster of the Pechiney factory to the remnants of the Atlantic Wall built by the Nazis, Gautrand's work is permeated by the need to create a bulwark against oblivion. In the words of philosopher Georges Santayana, his work reads like a warning: "Those who forget history are condemned to relive it.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
