Photoreceptors is a series of 4 larger-than-life photographs on banner, commissioned by the Sentier du Rhône Circuit d’Art Contemporain in 2011. The temporary public artwork was produced in collaboration with local governments, structural engineers (to analyze wind load) and outdoor service installers (industrial climbers).
The anonymous images feature the eyes of two of the oldest residents of the town of Pouzin, France. They are printed on triangular banners measuring 17 ft x 28 ft each, and face outward from the bridge connecting the town, which today lies on either side of the Rhone river.
The eyes look upstream and downstream, asking whose bodies represent us in public spaces and why larger-than-life billboards selling products and services occupy spaces that could be used to shape a collective history.
The images were hung on a riveted steel bridge constructed in 1961 that measures 292 meters long and weights 2000 tons. This structure is a functional artery connecting together two different French départements. The town of Pouzin itself was largely destroyed during World War II and subsequently rebuilt as a working-class community (ville ouvrière). The loss and of life and property in a site that serves as a strategic gateway to the Ardèche region is today rarely visible within the town itself.
Photoreceptors was an ephemeral intervention that intended to represent the human dimension of an industrial landscape where sources of electricity and transportation are far more dominant that individual, living, bodies.
The individuals photographed lived in the town’s retirement home and agreed to participate in the projects. Images of subjects’ eyes were cropped and printed on banners designed to fit into the bridge’s triangular trusses. The frame reinforced the shapes of the eyes and echoed the popular symbol of the all-seeing Eye of Providence, an eye often surrounded by rays of light and usually enclosed by a triangle. The mysterious symbol appears on the original Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, used to authenticate certain documents issued by the U.S. federal government, and represents the eye of God watching over mankind. Here, elderly local project participants take the place of the religious deity and stare out along a river that has flown in the same manner, day in and day out, from the time of their birth, to the time of their deaths. The eyes have a wistful, direct, and haunting quality; their regard does not affirm any particular vision of how mankind should live but rather meditates on the current shape of the landscape and the space it creates for human life.
*New: Learn more about the Photorecepteurs on the URCAUE (Conseil d’Architecture d’Urbanisme et de l’Environnement)’s Land art inventory, S-Pass!
