Olivier Culmann’s photos wittily asks anguished questions. He threads recurring questions about human freedom and its conditioning on a chaplet of proud subjectivity. In Morocco, India, the United States and France, he carried out a study of television, observing people watching their screens. Anti-ethnographically, he wondered primarily about one mystery: what will become of us after all those thousands of hours spent in a cathodic trance?
He then used photography to record New Yorkers?evolving look at the ruins of the World Trade Centre after 9/11. For seven years, he crisscrossed the planet to photograph «The Worlds of School? in collaboration with Mat Jacob: a work with no answers, only questions about the institution of schools. To what ball and chain do schools attach us? What tools for freedom do they offer us? With «The Life of a Chicken? he crosses two very straight lines: the factories of the chicken industry and the serried ranks of the last draftees during boot camp.
Amongst those echoes, a more private resonance can be detected: «Atlantic? «Untouchables?and a series on the ghost towns of Namibia, watching the time that passes during the voyage of a cargo ship and its containers, looking at the old age of low caste men and women in India and the sandy ruins of former German colonies.
Cecile Cazenave, journalist.