Prev exhibition | Next exhibition 

Following the footsteps of European refugees, Stéphane Duroy turns to their host country, the United States, the receptacle of a collective memory fleeing the stigmas of his past. From New York to Montana, he then followed the steps of immigrants who had arrived in the Promised Land in search of new departures. Faced with a disenchanted version of the "American dream", he brought back images of great melancholy and extreme sobriety, and published the book Unknown in 2007.
From 2009, he gradually detached himself from photography and set up another working process: collages, press clippings, anonymous photographs, paintings, erasures and tears fed and mistreated dozens of copies of his book, helping him to overcome a photographic surface that had become too poor for his taste.
Through this daily act of destruction and reconstruction, by adding layers of successive materials, he proceeds, like a palimpsest, to an erasure of the image.
These book objects become the catalysts of his obsessions. This attempt to exhaust the book and his own images allows Stéphane Duroy to go beyond his photography, break its codes and explore new territories of expression. Witness of a world that has become unbreathable, he uprooted his language.