From November 8 to February 8, the Municipal Archives of Lyon are dedicating a retrospective to Gilles Aymard, architect turned photographer. The story of two disciplines which intertwine and never let go.
In his interview given on the occasion of his retrospective “See Experiencing Architecture” at the Municipal Archives of Lyon, Gilles Aymard tells us, among other things, how attached he is to Lyon, his hometown, to architecture and photography. When we discover the exhibition itinerary imagined by Laurent Baridon, we understand above all to what extent the photographer is a lover of light, buildings, the people who animate them and the life around them.
In his photographs, Gilles Aymard makes people speak as much as the buildings and the elements that compose them, those of yesterday, today and tomorrow. At home, everyone finds their place.
Gilles Aymard is first known as an architectural photographer, an activity that he launched after almost 20 years as an architect, and which allowed him to travel throughout the country serving architectural agencies, developers, companies and all construction players. An experience rich in encounters, but also in discoveries that he has always immortalized in a more personal practice of photography. Because this is also the work of Gilles Aymard, an architectural photographer who also proves to be an architect of photography.
Over the course of construction sites or missions in the service of heritage, the photographer has produced, alongside his commissions, dozens and dozens of series highlighting building details, play of forms, craftsmen, men and women. who passed by, random arrangements which are transformed into a true graphic composition, of which he alone has the secret. Thus, the exhibition opens with a series of portraits of buildings, then the architectural photographer reveals himself as a photographer in his own right. Series of shots of stairs or grids of repetitive architectural elements captured almost become canvases.
Then humans enter the scene, passers-by seem to chat with statues and monuments in Turin, Lisbon, Berlin and of course at the Parc de la Tête d'Or. Later, it is no longer men, but time passing, on buildings, on stone, and little by little, what they were disappears, only traces remain which will also fade away. We have seen these marks on the walls 10 times and yet never like this. Gilles Aymard knows how to highlight what we see without seeing it, he makes architecture come alive, and even poetic in certain photos.
The “Light Vibrations” section is a mirror between two series of architectural photos taken in daylight vs artificial light, for a rendering of contrasts worthy of drawings or paintings. Finally, the exhibition shows the whole humanist dimension in the work of Gilles Aymard, but also the respect for the trades, the know-how and all the links in the chain which designs and constructs a building: the craftsmen, the Companions, the workers, these machine men often perched meters above the ground, yet well anchored in reality.
A journey of more than 135 photographs which reminds us that photography is obviously a matter of perception and sensitivity, but also of dialogue, architecture according to Gilles Aymard is a beautiful illustration of this.
And Laurent Baridon, curator of the exhibition, adds “Gilles Aymard paints a portrait of all these architectural lives: that of the designers and builders who give it body and life, that of the volumes which reveal the personality of the building , that of the shapes moving in the light, that of the details which capture the pulsations of the moment, that of the men and women who inhabit it and, at the moment of ruin, that of decay and decay. »
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