Thierry Clech

Thierry Clech is a French photographer based in Paris. Much of his work (exclusively in black & white films) is made during his travels (India, Ukraine, Istanbul, Tokyo...), but he also takes pictures in France, particulary in the business district of La Défense, near Paris. He published two books in collaboration with French novelists (Philippe Jaenada and Bernard Chambaz) and his work has been exhibited widely in France and abroad (Nadar Gallery, Press Club of France, Barrobjectif Festival, National Library of Belarus, FotoIstanbul Festival, BlowUp Angkor Festival in Cambodia…).

Artist statement:
Along roads, in Romania, there are dead animals, stray dogs, cats, foxes, hares and birds, crushed on the sides, throwned into ditches, there are hundreds, thousands who can not see the cars pass, and, gradually, as cars, trucks and carts roll on it, they flatten, inscribed within the bitumen as traces of what lived and now is no more. Sometimes, after the bend of a national road, approaching the large suburbs of Transylvania, Wallachia or Maramures - near Brasov, Cluj, Medias, Baia Mare, Targu Mures - open landscapes with factories and buildings of the past decades, in the same uniform and dirty gray, a little more sad under the rain when she scratches the atmosphere. Ghost buildings from the sixties, seventies and eighties, when reigned as a master the tovaras (comrade) Ceaucescu, who still haunts the memories - seen in Constanta, on the Black Sea, a crazy man with a gray-bearded, shabby beige coat, haranguing passers screaming Nicolae. Congested roads with Dacia, stained 4X4, trucks, harassed drivers only thinking swallow the miles, and speed up, overtake, don't slow down in villages where kids on their bike, nevertheless, tack without care about, women leave their bench to go talk on the other side, men wearing hats lead their horses, cats and dogs cross without a glance, and all this as a nice interlude, an anachronism - fifties this time - a rural world of the immediate postwar mysteriously catapulted today. Along roads, in Romania, to the north, or Moldova, remains appear back to life on the wet and black asphalt, where animals roam and shadows walk.