“I found it interesting how your series turns everyday waste into something fragile and precious, how it transforms the mundane into a somewhat mystic presence.”
Fabian Knierim, curator at the Westlicht Center of Photography , Vienna, Austria.
The Matter Matter photographic series presents waste, neglected traces of the common history that lives in us, crushed, swept, thrown, recovered after our passage.
Yet today theses wastes bear witness to a planetary lifestyle as complex as it is casual, as paradoxical as it is unequal. Waste is now the most important trace of our daily existence. Each of us throws garbage at home in the street, in the wild, everyday. This gesture is accomplished in half consciousness and forgotten a second later. In this way we are disconnected from the organic nature of the elements that constitute the very essence of all forms of life. But far from the eyes the waste continues to transform and is not inert. They become part of a moving universe and join the billions of particles that make up energy and matter.
About Michel Monteaux
Michel Monteaux is assistant director for cinema in France, prior to settling in the eighties in Los Angeles. He establishes himself as a professional photographer for editorial and advertising illustration. Passionate about the high desert, he opens a studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico and concentrates on portraits and reportage with a particular interest in American and Mexican folk art. He returns to France in the mid-90s, and continues his photographic work for the press and major corporate companies. He also persues a personal body of work which questions our place in the environment and our relationship to different forms of reality. [Official Website]
