Jean Baudrillard captured, and often exhibited, these photographs during his lifetime. Titled only for the city or town where the photograph was shot, they appear as fugitive confrontations between the lens and the surface of things. Scrims, veils, warped reflections and defective facades recur in these photographs as it is in these moments that reality, the major subject of Baudrillard’s discrimination, appears most conjectural.Each photograph is a record of an apparent absence: an absence of subject, an absence of meaning. The ‘gossamer thin difference between illusion and the real’ (Cool Memories III: Fragments, 1997) articulates itself in these works through the diaphanous, illusory layers that stack upon each other. Baudrillard chose photography not for its erroneous claim that it reproduces what one sees in the world, but precisely because to him, photographs looked like ‘nothing on earth’ (Impossible Exchange, 2001).
Château Shatto
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