Jusqu'a quand?

Artistic Description 

"Jusqu'à Quand" is a black-and-white photographic artwork that combines urban street photography with poetic expression. The image captures a bustling city street at night, filled with blurred figures—pedestrians immersed in their own pace and thoughts. The blurred motion and luminous night lights evoke a sense of disorientation, anonymity, and existential fatigue.

The central element is a vertical column of handwritten French poetry that pierces through the sky like a searchlight. The poem, meditative and melancholic, questions the duration of spiritual and emotional wandering. Words like errance nocturne (nocturnal wandering), cœurs de glaces (hearts of ice), and panique (panic) evoke isolation and collective detachment. The poetic voice wonders how long this nocturnal void, symbolized by artificial lights and indifferent crowds, will persist.

The visual contrast between the dark tones of the photograph and the bright, almost sacred typography suggests a cry for awakening amidst a society lost in routine and oblivion. The light trails and Christmas lights hint at festivity, but the mood remains distant—emphasizing the tension between outer brightness and inner emptiness.

Influences and Style

• Photographic Influences:

  • The image recalls the work of Brassaï and Daido Moriyama, both known for their grainy, high-contrast night photography capturing raw, candid urban life.

  • The motion blur and grain evoke cinéma vérité and noir aesthetics, echoing French New Wave cinema in its exploration of solitude and existential angst.

• Poetic and Literary Influence:

  • The language and tone of the poem evoke symbolist and existentialist traditions—reminiscent of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and later Albert Camus, in its questioning of meaning in modern life.

  • The vertical arrangement of text may also draw inspiration from concrete poetry, where visual form enhances or disrupts meaning.

• Artistic Themes:

  • Urban alienation

  • Time and existential questioning

  • Light vs. darkness (both literal and symbolic)

  • Disconnection in the age of hyper-connectivity