How fiction becomes reality
Since the late 90's, photographer and video maker Nicolas Descottes (born in 1968) has created a number of series of images where reality and fiction subly mingle. Whether they are from his first series (2000-2002) in which men seen from behind face the sea in Odessa, or Burns (2002) on the theme of burnt buildings or more recently in the night photos of a refinery near Rotterdam (2006) or a wine producing centre in the Medoc region (2007), reality seems truncated and inevitably calling for the imagination to complete it. The images of Nicolas Descottes suggest that indeed access to reality is limited and that recourse to fiction is necessary to understand it. The diverse explosions, lightings or fires and violent spraying metamorphosize the matter of the objects, giving them an almost pictorial aspect. Even if the photographs acknowledge the fact that these events have truly taken place, their number, their systematic character, their scope and the absence of consequences which emanate, all indicate that the events arise from a calculated fabrication, a materialization of the virtual.
Pursing this theme, Nicolas Descottes is currently concentrating on a more precise analysis of the semblance, the constructed and the used, in trial centers. In a second series of photographs started in 2007, taken throughout different centers in Europe (Reving and Skövde in Sweden, Woendrecht in Holland, Vernon in France), the question of the transformation of matter is moved to a secondary level.
This is to benefit of the observation of the scenery and props which enable the simulaitons to be carried out. A massive helicopter with opaque windows, an old train blocked by a van an occasional dummy placed here and there in vehicles or on the ground, are all photogrpahed in a more static manner. The images are more objective and stark than in the previous series. The objects appear to be waiting for action.
In these latest photogrpahs, the realism of the engines, counterbalanced by the roughness of certain intentionally neglected details, arouses a feeling which combines ludicrousness and terror and provokes suspicion - but is this about paranoia - ? as to the real vocation of the simulation. The objects indeed appear to be big toys waiting to imitate war. Series within the series, some photos present strangely damaged cars fixed in an almost playful posture. The construction of our own fiction.
Translated into English from an article written in French by Vanessa Morisset.