After Ukraine, Krakow, Budapest and Romania, Thierry Clech, continues, with Tbilisi, his series on the Eastern countries.
Capital of Georgia, Tbilisi is located in the eastern part of the country, on the banks of the Kura. It covers an area of 726 km2. Built on a seismic zone, the city has more than one million inhabitants. It bears in many places the effects of several earthquakes, including cracked facades, collapsed houses.
The architecture of Tbilisi bears witness to its long and complex history, with art nouveau buildings, Ottoman-style wooden houses and Soviet-era buildings. These are all traces of a complex and eventful past, which Thierry Clech has seized while moving away from the historic city center, where Russian tourists concentrate, to explore more unexpected neighborhoods, looking for more surprising scenes.
Thierry Clech work without any constraint, in black and white. He choose his trips and the themes he wants to treat. No technical razzle-dazzle, but he tries to explore all the facets of the language of seeing. His pictures show life, quietly, with a taste for the understatement. They record the passage of time, scenes seemingly mundane but which contain, if we break of our habits and our visual laziness, a part of magic, surrealism, funniness or sadness.
Each time he press the shutter release button, he grasps the scope and accuracy of the moment, the accuracy of the organization chart of its images, while putting in it emotional strength.
His images show his intimate view of the world and learn to looking that world with respect, wonder and melancholy. Indeed, he records on film what he sees – light, movement, landscapes and people – as if he sees them for the first and last time, like a child discovering the world, and an old man getting ready to leave it.
About the author:
Thierry Clech only uses silver-based photography and his pictures are exclusively black and white. He takes photographs during his travels : India, Japan, Nicaragua, Ukraine… His work has already been shown in France and abroad (National library of Belorussian, the Nadar gallery, the Barrobjectif festival, the Book and photography festival of Tourcoing, the FotoIstanbul festival, Argentic Gallery…). He has published five books. He lives in Paris.
