Silence in the morning, beautiful series of photographs depicting and describing the mood and dimension of the city montreal. Julien has been doing this project for sometime, and his work is versatile from capturing the blanket of mist all over the city to the black cats creating a high tension drama. The Solitude walkers and the geometries of some skyscrapers all form part of his story. The tones and colors gel well with the mood and surreality surrounding these cityscapes, makes us wonder the level of marksmanship from our mankind.
Let us hear it from Julien Coquentin on more about his project with amazing photographs.
About the Series:
It is now a little less than a year since I left Montreal. I often think about it. I remember the streets, detachment and imagination of its people, the sensations experienced by creating this photographic diary, magnified by the passing of time.
For two years, I photographed Montreal tirelessly. I wanted to make a poetic of the city and distance, an American walk. Photographing the street requires to detach yourself a time. The moment before we were all together, caught in the powerful and heady flow of a city moving, the next moment I was taking a walk on the side to tear myself away from the crowd.
I worked at night in the ER of a big hospital. For two years I lived in the Mile End, a cosmopolitan neighborhood with my wife and our two daughters. Few blocks nestled between Park Avenue and St. Laurent Boulevard. North, two black lines in the snow where succeeded the trains of the Canadian Pacific Railway, South, the narrow streets of the plateau.
This America finally merged with my childhood dream when I imagined, in the darkness of the cinema, what it could be living beyond the ocean. Kids out there made me think of those populating my childhood in France.
It is therefore a bit of my own memory that over time I photographed in the streets, a spectator of the rhythm now well oiled of a world shaking. Photographs of a space defined this diary is also a window on the inside, through which everyone can draw a memory of its own history.
Today the sharpest sensations that remain in my memory, are probably the ones I felt during early winter mornings, when was ending my night job. I left the hospital, impregnated with the smell and the mood of others, the icy cold outside had killed any perfume. I remember the empty and white boulevards, and a snow falling gently, silently.
I loved photographing these moments.
It is a strange thing to discover a country, a city, working at night in the ER, I feel that way this can not be a lie, we are closer to our weaknesses. Night work has this virtue: It allows us to swim against the current.
The title of this series “Early Sunday morning” is borrowed from Edward Hopper painted this painting in 1930 preserved today at the Whitney Museum in New York. I authorized this loan first because Hopper touches me, but also because Sunday is a day to my peculiar sense, a silence in the measurement, a little death.
“Early Sunday morning” is also the testimony of the changing nature of the city that constantly changes, dies and is reborn. Of the movement of atoms, fragility of the city, I extracted two years.
Silence in the measurement. Again, a little death.
“Morning, keep the streets empty for me”.
About the Photographer
Julien Coquentin was born in 1976 and has a passion for photography since 2007. His work noticed during the creation of a photographic dairy compound sandstone streets of Montreal, has been exposed for several months in Paris (Negative + And Bydahinden) then in Boulogne Billancourt in the Voz’Galerie early the year 2013.
Focusing on issues of deforestation and indigenous rights, he made “Green Wall” in November 2012 in Malaysia where he spend several months.
Julien now lives with his wife and two children in France.
You can find Julien Coquentin on the Web :
Copyrights:
All the pictures in this post are copyrighted to Julien Coquentin. Their reproduction, even in part, is forbidden without the explicit approval of the rightful owners.
1 comment
Congratulations on a wonderful progression in your work, personally I find the strongest images are those of the street scenes that use that blue hour colour palette, although I see you’ve attempted dynamics in the work i.e. using still life interpretations and a wider variation of colour, I believe you should try and focus in making the pictures more coherent to the first image; in relation to this I suggest studying the work of Eugene Atget and his early morning work on Paris in transition. Finally well done on the selected strongest images that I do think work coherently, and thank you for inspiring me to leave my studio for once to photograph the morning.
Harry Lee White, student of fine art photography.