Denis Darzacq

17Nov08

Inspired by the French riots of 2005, Denis Darzacq asked dancers and athletes to perform jumps against backgrounds that he had found and prepared for his series La chute. He wanted to capture an entire generation in freefall and with no one to catch them, a society in which youth is ignored, feared and left to crash.

Everything had been prepared in advance. Everything was ready. The models launched themselves into space. There is nothing false in these scenes. There is no fiction, no retouching or special effects. Photographed in the courtyards of buildings or in streets in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, in Nanterre and in Biarritz, these young people were just being themselves, simply performing jumps in a modern urban setting. And the photographer shot the images, intervening only to give a few guidelines as to their movements. However, at the moment of the leap, chance and gravity also intervened.

Darzacq won a World Press Award in 2007 for his series La Chute, in 2008 he used the same technique to shoot the series Hyper, which is set in hypermarkets.

http://denis.darzacq.revue.com/

More pictures and a behind the scenes video after the jump.

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Tags: athletes, dancers, hyper, hypermarkets, la chute, Paris, Photography, street photography