As part of the ‘Photobiennale-2020’ the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents, for the first time in Russia, the ‘Productive Seascapes’ project by Nicolas Floc’h, contemporary French photographer, founder of the Ocean Art Observatory, member of the DEMAIN, L’OCÉAN research group and lecturer at EESAB, the European Higher School of Arts in Brittany.
Since the moment the camera first recorded life underwater, a vast number of sub-ocean footage has appeared, fascinating us with bizarre natural forms and colours. Today, underwater photography is a special, constantly evolving genre of photography. The two series by Nicolas Floc’h included in the project ‘Productive Seascapes’ completely violate established canons of the genre, despite the title and topography of the images.
Nicolas Floc’h is an artist, explorer, sailor, and diver who examines ocean life in the context of cultural history and world art history. His ‘Productive Structures’ series (2011—2019) focuses on artificial reefs. Few people know that on the seabed there are cities and villages consisting of thousands of buildings erected by humans to support the flora and fauna of the ocean. The largest of them reach 35 metres in height. In Japan alone there are about twenty thousand such ‘cities’. Similar projects exist in most countries with access to the sea. The construction of artificial reefs is an important part of programmes to restore disturbed ecosystems.
In the series ‘Productive Seascapes’ (2016—2019), Floc’h reveals the ocean world to the viewer in its prehistoric, eventless grandeur. The search for an adequate visual language forces the artist to reformulate the laws of the landscape genre developed for land photography. ‘The underwater environment must be treated in a special way, guided by completely different criteria when determining the contours from those used on the surface. We are not moving across a plane, however uneven it may be, we move in the strata of water, that is, in the space that extends from the surface to the bottom. The result is a fundamental change in the concept of a point of view,’ writes the photographer. ‘I decided to shoot the underwater landscape in natural light, and at a wide angle. The panoramic image eliminates the feeling of any kind of presence. Black and white photography allows you to work with illusions generated by the water environment itself, the density of the image, and the effect of turbidity, which in the underwater world performs the same function as the horizon line above ground.’