Denis Darzacq : The Fall
As part of I Kiffe NY - French Urban Culture Festival
The French photographer Denis Darzacq is just as content to mess with people’s minds. His bizarre series La Chute (The Fall), on show in Paris, has gripped the French art world. People have clamoured to know what on earth is happening in these pictures - taken with a manual camera and not Photoshopped - in which impassive 20-year-olds seem about to hit the ground at high speed.
When The Fall won this year’s World Press Photo prize in the "arts and entertainment" category, the organisers rang Darzacq to ask the name of the dance company he had photographed. But it wasn’t a dance company. It was a carefully crafted response of Darzacq and a group of young French people to the alienation of youths on suburban housing estates after the riots that shook France in 2005.
In 2006, Darzacq dreamt up The Fall. It was partly the horror-struck idea of people falling from the twin towers on September 11, but it was mostly a depiction of an entire generation in France in free fall, ignored by society, their energy untapped and unused. He felt today’s France was the sort of place where someone could tumble from the sky without a net and no one walking down the street would bat an eyelid.
Denis Darzacq Photographer
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Written on Aug. 21, 08
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