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What if, suddenly, Paris - the City of Light - were to go dark, erased from the map, emptied of its inhabitants, like the deserted megapolis of a fallen empire? Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, photographers of modern decrepitude, transpose this unsettling reality into our own. Galerie Fontana, having exhibited the artists’ series in its entirety – beginning with the “Ruins of Detriot” (2005 - 2010), presents the latest continuation, “Les Ruines de Paris.” The artists wander through the now-deserted streets of the French capital, subverting the iconography that defines its image. In doing so, they revisit the hypothesis proposed by American essayist Alan Weisman in The World Without Us (2007), which explores the consequences—particularly for infrastructure—of humanity’s suddendisappearance from the planet Earth. Ruins are objects of fascination and projection, an aesthetic and critical focal point. The human mind instinctively unfolds itself around them, much like plants root and grow over old stones. In this way, the motif traverses history in its ability to link past, present and possible future.

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In the 19th century, ruins became a preferred subject for German and English Romantics, such as Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner. Their meditations on humanity's place, the ephemeral, and the cycles of civilizations found echoes in French literature, with writers like Hugo and Lamartine reflecting on these themes in an era marked by political upheaval and insurrections. Photography emerged during this period, thanks to pioneers like Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and William Henry Fox Talbot. More than a technical innovation, it provided a new way to document and represent the world, challenging traditional artistic paradigms. Photography's inherent stillness and permanence made it particularly suited to capturing ruins, counteracting their physical erasure: "Ruins disappear; photography preserves." In revisiting the historical, the artists’ research on the role of photography traces back to the introduction of dark tourism and what they term ‘ruinsploitation’, with the documentation and commercialisation of images produced directly after the "Bloody Week" occurring after the proclamation of the Paris Commune in 1871. 

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A pictorial exploration of ruins seemed logical—it seemed so obvious that they approached it with caution. Photography established itself as a medium of authority over reality, providing snapshots of events that seemed to offer objective truth. Yet, with critical reflection, technical evolution, and the advent of artistic experimentation, photography moved beyond its initial role, questioning its own objectivity. Furthemore, the development of the terrifyingly powerful AI tool of synthesis and imitation presented the opportunity for the duo to delve into twilight imagination whilst reflecting on the role of photography as an optical device. Ultimately, the apocalyptic imagination in AI is, after all, a recurring theme, almost a stylistic exercise. One January afternoon in 2024, the artists launched their first four iterations as an experiment. To bring this project to life, they generated over 52,000 images, averaging 650 attempts per finalised image. As the images loaded on the screen, and despite a somewhat rough result, seeing the 'physical,' tangible reality of the organic decay spreading through the streets of Paris and feeling the sense of abandonment in a setting that was not exotic to them, was truly unsettling— though they thought they had anticipated the feeling. There is always a gap between imagining, designing, and seeing concretely.

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Nevertheless, AI should not merely be a tool for representing fantasies or a regurgitation of its training corpus—which inevitably carries normative tendencies, biases, gimmicks, and other excesses. Marchand and Meffre needed to use the city's constraints, along with its historical and cultural materiality, to anchor it in reality. The French capital possesses a uniquely recognisable visual identity—both orderly and dotted with symbolic monuments, gathering places, sites of influence, and power—making it an embodiment of "culture" in the philosophical sense, oppositional to nature. By stepping away from pure fantasy, this "ruination" became, for them, an opportunity to create a spectacular demonstration of the conceivable blurring between reality and simulation already at play. In this collision of fiction and reality shaped by anxiety, the navigation between historical and personal references allows the photographers to delineate ruinism. They raise a pressing question: With human ingenuity challenged by the overwhelming rise of its own creation, is it now our material and physical human space that risks collapse? Are we witnessing our own obsolescence?

 

About the artists

Parisian-born Yves Marchand (b. 1981) and Romain Meffre (b. 1987) continue to live and work in the city. Their working relationship began between 2002 and 2005 after discovering a shared interest in photography and its potential to illustrate the rise and fall of our societies. Independently taught, the duo has been exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; Polka Galerie, Paris; MUDO Musée de l'Oise, Beauvais; Tristan Hoare Gallery, London; Maison des Arts, Antony; Cultuurcentrum Caermersklooster, Gent; MUCEM, Marseille; Witley Court, Great Witley; Museo Nazionale Romano, Roma; and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco to name a few. Their workcan be found in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Deutsches Filminstitut, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, Fondation Carmignac, The Ford Foundation, and Fondation d'entreprise Hermès. Marchand and Meffre have been the recipients of prizes such as the Prix des Libraires in the category of J' aime le livre d' art for “Les Ruines de Paris” (2024) and the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis for “The Ruins of Detroit” (2012).

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Saturday 8 February  - Saturday 3 May 2025

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For an overview of the available works click HERE

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