Erased (Palimpsest III)

• Photographer
  Tommy Goguely
• Photo Date
  2021-2023

From the late 1950s, Bernd and Hilla Becher initiated a photographic inventory of the architectural heritage from the industrial era, then marked by obsolescence and destined for disappearance. The 'Erased' series actualizes a process of erasure operating here at an earlier stage. Focusing on blue water towers against clear skies, captured frontally in direct sunlight, these images reveal only evanescent outlines. In this way, they symbolize the paradigm shift at play in a post-industrial society now striving to conceal its underlying material infrastructures.

Born in 1984, Tommy Goguely lives and works in Bordeaux. A graduate in fundamental physics and holder of a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, he started photography as a self-taught amateur. After a three-year course at the Bordeaux Fine Arts School, he redirected his practice towards works with more conceptual influences. Inspired by photography theory, his approach aims to fuel the reflections about the medium and more specifically its evolution at the phase transition to digital, with the underlying hypothesis of an ontological identity between analog and digital photography.