The French Riviera is a region steeped in references from art history, cinema, and mass visual culture. These references awaken in us a wealth of images that are very difficult to escape, to the point that our perception of reality is conditioned by the density of a collective imagination that acts as a filter, hindering any attempt to escape the cliché. From a photographic point of view, these clichés mainly take the form of two representations: on the one hand, the souvenir photograph, a testimony to the exceptional nature of the tourist experience enjoyed by the visitor, and on the other, the postcard, which highlights the extraordinary character of the place.
Despite having been taken in one of the world’s leading tourist destinations, Promenade is not born out of the exceptional experience of travel, but out of daily repetition, familiarity, and the wear and tear of a landscape traversed over and over again. Disconnecting itself from the official gaze—that which “must be seen”—the series proposes an insistent, almost obstinate drift. Repeatedly photographing the same space does not lead to redundancy, but to a progressive decanting of the gaze: the marginal elements, accidents, and imperfections of the landscape that go unnoticed by the occasional visitor begin to emerge, shifting the center of interest from what is traditionally considered worth seeing to the marginal, the imperfect, that which does not demand attention.
The images, sober and stripped of narrative emphasis, function as a counterweight to the excesses of mass tourism and the visual saturation produced by the hyperproduction of contemporary images. Promenade thus inscribes itself in a desire for critical distancing from these regimes of representation, inviting the viewer to reconsider their relationship with the landscape, contemplating it with renewed attention.
