Did you know "Space Utopia from Vincent Fournier" ? Space is humanity's great adventure, a leap into the void, into the dark light, beyond the protective atmosphere of the Earth and the gravity that connects us to it. It is the universal desire to contemplate the sky but also to project oneself into it. Desire, from the Latin desiderare means nostalgia for the star, regret for a lost star.
But how could one desire something unknown? Could it be that the stardust that we are remembers that primitive time when we were floating in space? Man would then be like a god fallen from heaven, nostalgic and unconscious of this star he has lost.
Fascination, aesthetic, philosophical and playful for the space adventure most certainly comes from the images and books we saw and read in the 70s and 80s, from those television series, novels and science fiction films, documentaries and news, which have mixed and overlaid in my memory like a palimpsest. Vincent Fournier images are the result of this mixture between purely documentary elements and a very constructed staging where each element depends on a general composition. Thus, the emblematic places of the conquest of space have become film sets where Tintin would meet Jules Verne in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 film, The Space Odyssey.
Between 2007 and 2017 Vincent Fournier photographed the past and future of space exploration, from the memories of the Apollo program that followed Man's first steps on the moon, to NASA's future SLS rocket to Mars. This decade also marks the opening up and transition from politics to economics in the space sector, whose geographical dimension is now global and global.
Indeed, after the Cold War and the domination of the national superpowers, space exploration is less a military issue than an economic investment driven also by private industries with multiple interests: communication, science, research and development, meteorology, ecology, health, technology and even space tourism.
A 10-year photographic odyssey[2007/2017] that reveals the most emblematic and well-kept space centres and observatories in the world. Vincent Fournier staged with aesthetics and poetry the history of space exploration, from the Apollo and Sputnik programs to NASA's future mission to Mars.