Chorégraphie, 2025

Christian Goetghebeur  

View from the heights of the Centre Pompidou, a crowd crosses a vast urban space. Passersby meet, draw closer, or move away, each following their own trajectory. But their shadows, stretched on the ground, form a second population, more imposing, which seems to obey its own movements.

The photograph captures this moment where individual and spontaneous movements produce a collective composition. The lines of the pavement structure the space, while the silhouettes and their shadows introduce rhythms, approaches, and breaks. The everyday scene thus acquires the dimension of an involuntary choreography.

This work from my photographic writing "Sublimations" explores the metamorphoses of the visible. The work on color and light redistributes the relationships between the figures and their shadows. The orangey tones of the ground contrast with the turquoise shadows, which become real plastic forms.

The singularity of this photograph lies in this reversal: the shadows, usually secondary, become the protagonists of the image. The gaze circulates between the bodies, their colored doubles and the geometric lines, discovering in an ordinary scene an almost abstract composition, whose balance is born of chance.

Technique and edition

Color silver print on Fujiflex Crystal Archive paper mounted on Dibond with lifted edges.

Limited edition of 7 copies, all formats combined.