Max Riché : « Old New World »

"One year ago, from March to May 2020, when Paris was entering a confinement linked to Covid-19, I decided to stage the end of a model that had reached its limits, lived so intensely. Inspired by the literature of anticipation proper to the anxious times of dystopian futures (1984 - Orwell, A Brave New World - Huxley, The Night of the Times - Barjavel), I question myself on our hopes of renewal. I am interested in this frontier between the possible and the impossible, nevertheless happened.
To give an account of the supernatural character felt at the time, I choose to divert the expected representation of documentary silver photography by a process which blurs our reference points of past, present, future, reality and fiction. A Japanese paper negative gives the photographs an aspect of another time. Subject to shooting accidents, it allows mysterious objects to appear from the sky, upsetting our certainties and casting doubt on the very rationality of what we see. The black and white emulsion coated directly on this paper gives a glimpse of its delicate texture, made of fibers of flowers and mulberry. These delicate natural elements become for a time the very real witnesses of a world that was thought to be indestructible, but whose beliefs were ultimately fragile."
Maxime Riché

His background as an engineer allows Maxime Riché to decipher and present the complex environment that surrounds us with elegance and simplicity. He uses photography to study the notion of limit in our modern societies and its frequent refusal to satisfy our more or less essential demands: to produce, to grow, or to reach eternal life while being more and more disconnected from the natural world. He increasingly uses the photographic medium itself as part of his subject matter. His recent work includes « Deliver Us » (2019) on the economy of bicycle delivery drivers in Paris, or « Paradise » (2020) on the megafires of California.
He has been exhibited notably at the Grand Palais (Paris, 2015), Itinéraires des Photographes Voyageurs (Bordeaux, 2016) and at the Cui Zhenkuan Museum (Xi'an, China, 2016) for the first 30-year retrospective of photography in China. Invited to give a TEDx talk in Wageningen (Netherlands) in 2018 on his work committed to the environment and climate change, he presented Climate Heroes, his first documentary work and movement founded in 2009, exhibited at COP21 in Paris, on which a book is currently in preparation.