Posted on May 3, 2012 by Florentin Juillet
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……….This series was inspired by a feeling of nostalgia. One photo sowed the seeds of my approach: a photograph of the French Alps, taken from a summit by the German photographer Michael Schnabel, in the middle of the night. To create a landscape with an extreme absence of light, he exposed the film for a prolonged exposure time for about an hour. The result was a dark, extremely cold photo displaying all of the range of grays that could possibly come to mind. The stillness of the mountains made the photos really sharp, except for the clouds that left lighter marks in the sky. At first, I could not say exactly what moved me most about the photo. Was it the cold aesthetics? The method used to take the shot?
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I soon found out what feeling it was: nostalgia. These photographs reminded me of the cold air of the Alps, the silence of the upper slopes when I used to go skiing with my family, reminded me of how it felt to be back home in France. This feeling was reinforced by the aesthetics of the picture – it reminded me of a dream, something surrealistic.
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These images were created during a special period for me; as I am about to leave the place where I have been living for a year, a feeling of nostalgia slowly emerges. Influenced by this feeling created by the night shot of the Alps, I tried to capture views of Philadelphia in the same way: night photos with really long exposure times of places I know by heart, with the goal to see them differently, and anticipate the way I might dream about those places in the years to come.
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One of the main purposes of photography is to create memory, to find again an exact view we had back in time. By creating these kinds of pictures, slightly different from what my eyes are used to seeing, compelled me to create a variation of what I would have normally remembered. Is that cheating, lying? No: memory is exactly the truth anyway, it is always distorted by subjectivity and the mindset we had at the time, for the place remembered. I just wanted to shape my memories as I would like to remember them.
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About The Author: Florentin Juillet is a junior enrolled in the College at the University of Pennsylvania as a foreign exchange student.









































