From Intervalles by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond

Can you spot the clones in these landscapes?

Landscape photographer Mathieu Bernard-Reymond’s populates his images with digitally manipulated doubles

While many landscape photographers walk for hours to find a secluded spot, the Frenchman Mathieu Bernard-Reymond doesn’t like his landscapes to be empty in the slightest.

Bernard-Reymond, who has exhibited his work in France, Switzerland and Germany as well as in China, fills his serene photographs with duplicates of lone people actually captured within them. 

 

From Intervalles by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
From Intervalles by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond

“These images are constructed from several shots,” Bernard-Reymond explains. “The characters are cloned, juxtaposed with each other according to their repeated moves.”

 

From Intervalles by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
From Intervalles by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond

Fooling us into thinking that the landscapes are full of activity and crowds, viewers might be surprised to realize that in this series, called Intervalles, the people are all the same. Indeed, Bernard-Reymond’s photographs look more like a record of an individual’s time spent within the frame, or a photographic diagram of how they used the landscape.

 

From Intervalles by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
From Intervalles by Mathieu Bernard-Reymond

“One's immediate reaction to the Intervalles is to conclude that the landscape is indeed a busy place, crawling with ant-like humans,” Bernard-Reymond says. “But when one begins to mentally subtract the various clones, one is left with another feeling, one of profound emptiness, the solitude of human existence, the 'lightness of being'.”

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