| الوصف: |
A brief coda to this book considers how photographers might attend to places that were once officially part of France but are no longer. By way of example, the chapter offers a reading of Thomas Jorion’s 2016 series, Vestiges d’empire. While Jorion’s work makes visible the architectural and infrastructural remnants of France’s imperial aspirations across Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean, his photographs suggest how the countless ruins of France’s transoceanic legacy elicit a spatially orchestrated form of trauma that continues to exert its force in the present. Jorion’s work thereby problematizes what we mean when we talk about “French” landscapes, positing the idea of the Hexagon and the very notion of the national territory as psychically loaded and limiting concepts. The Topographic Imaginary thus concludes by inviting further inquiry into contemporary photographic visions of landscapes not only in metropolitan France, but throughout the francophone post-colony and beyond. |
