Sport seen from the sky by photographer Edouard Salmon

Since 2017, Édouard Salmon, photographer by trade and sportsman by passion, travels across France armed with his drone, capturing photos magnified by the colors and lights throughout the seasons. Between a documentary-style book and a philosophical treatise on sport, the work combines impressive photographs and impactful quotes from the greatest.

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More doing than saying

« Elevation”, “harmony”, “flight”, “explosion of energy”, “success”: the vocabulary coming from the lexical field of power and freedom underlines each of his photos. Going beyond the simple impact on the physical level, Édouard Salmon gives sport its nobility, echoing, through his pen and his eye, the notion of success and mental, almost psychic pleasure, that this practice makes possible.

The book, in addition to being aesthetic and representative of a wide range of physical activities, defines exercise as the importance of surpassing oneself and therefore of ambition. “Sport consists of delegating to the body some of the strongest virtues of the soul,” manifests Jean Giraudoux (Le Sport, 1928), right in the middle of the book.

Unsurprisingly, the preface is written by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. “More than the sport itself, it is its graphic vision that has always fascinated me », confesses the master of aerial photography.

A masterful work

Édouard Salmon thus offers a version of his discipline, at its most explicit. He captures a clear movement, playing with the shadows of his subjects in full action: a unique and masterful result guaranteed, sublimated by the immensity of the fields and spaces in which the athletes exercise.

Curves of the shadow of a paddle on clear water with the ordered lines of a tennis court, geometric paintings are drawn where time seems stopped, freezing its extras sometimes flying, sometimes dancing, in any case, expressing themselves physically through madness.

> “Sport seen from the sky”, by Édouard Salmon, Amphora, 224 p., €50.

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