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Didier Massard
didier massard, voyages imaginaires [le château d'eau], 1993
photographie couleur, 96 x 120cm
courtesy galerie baudoin-lebon, paris
courtesy julie saul gallery, new york
Born in 1953 in Paris, he lives and works there.
The series of Voyages imaginaires (imaginary journeys) takes us to places of fantasy: a lighthouse, a great cliff, a pagoda, a desert crossed by a caravan. Didier Massard builds models as if they were theatre sets for scenarios that he then photographs. One would think they were real and yet one wonders if these places ever existed. Didier Massard moves from handmade to photographic opulence, and his work perhaps refers to older images while remaining totally contemporary. Les Voyages imaginaires reveals the path photography has taken from its documentary origins, in a tour de force of equivocal ingenuity.