About the series Unseen Sight:
«The idea of transformation is central in my work. Based on multiple explorations of archeological sites in the Near East, Unseen Sights is a new and on-going project focusing on the earth’s changes and the traces of time seen from the digital era. I aim to create a link between past and present by using the illusionary capacities of photography.
In one part of my work, original landscape photographs are manipulated in the studio through various interventions. I make use of the traditional technique of photographic colorization, a method popular in oriental visual culture. Initially, this method served to enhance the realism of black and white photographs, but unlike the original purpose of this technique I use it to abstract the photographs instead.
These interventions underline both the process of image making, as well as the archetypes linked to oriental landscape photography.
The second part of my work focuses on documenting defected objects which have been 3D printed and disregarded by the factory in which they were produced. These items are presented in a way which calls upon the aesthetics of traditional documentary museum photography. Despite having never been used and having no historic value, these objects are elevated to historic remnants of an acient civilization through their presentation. In a constant back and forth between the exotic and the domestic, the tridimensionnality of shapes and bidimensionality of photography, I aim to raise questions about the way in which we view photographs and contemporary image production»
Douglas Mandry