Anton Renborg: Days in Vichy [signed]

In the shadow of its former Belle Epoque glory. ”Vichy is a stage of display and a shadow theatre. Swedish photographer Anton Renborg has strolled by stately villas swaggering beneath an over-excess of ornament, and wandered up to mysterious, untidy houses that seem coiled up to hide the secrets lurking within. He has walked by faces bearing the marks of time, ghosts from the Belle Epoque, and has snapped bodies barely out of childhood yet already compelled to play adult games. He has opened doors that closed right back on him, gone up broad avenues and no-entry streets, and sipped at the well of the gaze of young girls in flower and the Fontaine des Célestins, whose mineral water lightens up the complexion of old men. He creates images of a city based at one and the same time on appearance and the concealed. Just a few images, a rare, multifaceted bouquet of photographs with bright notes and white pages, the missing shots of a city that can also be read in its recesses. Renborg builds stories out of images like musical scores, playing with the assonance of colours, the tempos of landscapes, the rhythms of architecture, to produce clean, unaffected photographs that act no less as catalysts of fiction.” - Excerpt from Natacha Wolinski's text