Yves Marchand & Roman Meffre
Meet the Photographers
All things decay and die
All things decay with time: The forest sees
The growth and down-fall of her aged trees;
That timber tall, which three-score lustres stood
The proud dictator of the state-like wood,
I mean the sovereign of all plants, the oak,
Droops, dies, and falls without the cleaver's stroke.
Robert Herrick
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Yves Marchand and Roman Meffre both live and work in Paris. Initially pursuing photography individually, they met online in 2002 and started working together with the beginning of their Detroit project in 2005. The Ruins of Detroit in 2010 is a study of the disused and derelict building in the once thriving American industrial city which have since the decline in the industry been closed, abandoned and forgotten. They are currently completing their latest project called Gunkanjima which continues the studies the and they continue to work on a project documenting American theatres that have either fallen into decay or been transformed entirely. Their work has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe and has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, The British Journal of Photography, Time Magazine, amongst others
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre are two young French photographers, both interested in contemporary ruins, they have been working together since 2002.
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They started their collaboration with the exploration of Parisian remains and later broadened their horizons to Europe (Belgium, Spain and Germany) before venturing further, to the United States and Asia.
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“During our visits to ruins, we always try to focus on remarkable buildings, whose architecture embodies the psychology of an age and a system. In it we observe the metamorphosis of the process of decay”, explain Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.
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While in Detroit, working on their first American project The Ruins of Detroit they discovered American movie theatres: these lost palaces standing like preserved relics of Hollywood’s golden age. These abandoned building from the golden age of movies are a stark but familiar contrast to the industrial buildings form the automotive age.
Subsequently, the duo began an investigation on a Japanese Island nicknamed “Gun- kanjima”, (“battleship island” in Japanese). The old mining city that this island contains was deserted in 1974 and now stands completely abandoned. Over the course of two trips, in 2008 and then again in 2012, Marchand and Meffre photographed this isolated boulder lost off the coast of Nagasaki. This series was also published by Steidl in the eponymous book in May 2013.
What i like about their work:
The old architecture I find fascinating
The pops of colour
What i don't like about their work:
The mass of in focus area, i think it would be better if they had a smaller area in focus because otherwise everything is to busy
Ruin photography is essentially a fascination with urban decay. The photos look at buildings in the post-industrial world that have been abandoned and forgotten, are often rundown and, ultimately, are falling into ruin. Some of these buildings were once beautiful and extravagant, and the photography captures a sad sense of faded glory and despair. Some were enormous in scale and heavily industrial and utilitarian to begin with, and the photography captures an almost seedy and embarrassing sense of waste as outdated technology is left to rot.