PHILIPPE DURAND - OFFSHORE 3 at Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris until 3 Jan 09

With Offshore, Philippe Durand continues to explore the possibilities of representing contemporary questions, notably those concerning the flow of the globalized economy. The exhibition brings together a set of images, taken in the Caribbean in 2007, through which Philippe Durand confronts the hyper-visibility of the trade world with the opacity of the world of capital flow. While the Caribbean initially evokes a luxury tourist destination, it is also one of the symbols of free-market capitalism.

These lush landscapes are relay-points for the international compensation chambers, where a good chunk of the wealth produced by world capitalism transits in order to become invisible. The absence of information on the kitsch fronts of offshore banks, boiled down to their symbolic form, stands in opposition to the show of market values produced by this underground economy (golf cars, sailboats...). Yet Philippe Durand introduces an entropic dimension to this catalogue of signs produced by the contemporary world. Disinvested cars, houses or boats also seem to be trying to hide in the landscape, like new scrap losing its values.

Philippe Durand tends to give a different representation of the big questions that traverse history and proposes a possible contemporary realism.

A catalogue co-published by the Centre-Photographique d'Ile de France, the Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris, and the Centre de la Photographie, Geneva, is available.

PHILIPPE DURAND - OFFSHORE 2