Découpages

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At first Martin d’Orgeval’s fifth monograph, Découpages, appears as a collection of found objects, an anonymous catalogue with an unknown purpose. As the book unfolds, our vision embarks on a mysterious journey: the photographer’s unmitigated attention to shapes and shades, and lines and surfaces, challenges our ingrained viewing habits. Our personal associations and perceptions mingle with photographs of stacked marble plates in which nature and man’s intervention combine to produce self-processed, “cut-out” drawings and structures, “découpages”—a symbolic echo of what early pioneer of photography William Henry Fox Talbot coined in The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), the first commercially produced book illustrated with photographs.