© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

Tell us about where you grow up. What kind of place it was? And then photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

Raphaël Bourelly (RA): I was born and raised in Paris. I grew up in a popular district, and I like to think that I somehow managed to taste the youth of a child in the countryside, because of the large waste ground in front of my place. I spent numerous hours of my childhood playing there, building huts. I’m pretty sure that fed my fascination for empty spaces, and “wild” urbanism. 

I discovered photography in the laboratory of a photo club, when I was in secondary school. But what interested me at this time was essentially the magic of the chemistry, and not really the act of shooting. When the photo club closed, I only shot occasionally a roll or two at that time. Things accelerated when I was about 25, I started taking more and more pictures and discovered something new, and way of expression that suited me. I am self taught, just like Sebastien. I’m really not sure about my very first shot. But I remember my first initiation to photography. My brother-in-law took me to a big park (Le Jardin des Plantes) and we spent the whole day taking pictures. I have a memory of a fountain, with crocodiles sculptures...

Sébastien Tixier (SE): I grew up in central France, in a small town with a former industrial background. The population was older than the usual national mean, but the streets were empty with near zero traffic and thus made a perfect playground. A lot of pictures from my series Instant of Latencies are actually shot in this town.

I've been fascinated by the camera of my father (a Zenit 12 XP camera) since I was a little child, but I haven't come to photography before turning about 26. As a teen, I had drawings and paintings lessons for a few years but I did not feel like continuing for long. And when I’ve grown older, photography appeared like the most interesting way to express myself. I liked the fact that it captures reality, but yet it is not possible to know if it accurate or staged. I think my very first shot when I was a child was a stormy and cloudy sunset in my grandparents’ place. But nothing serious then. My first “serious” shots in my learning process were architecture and “urbex”.

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

What about your educational background? How do you relate to this? Any takeaways? Any meaningful courses? Any professor or teacher you remember well?

ST: We are both self-taught photographers actually. We learned photography “online” and it’s actually how we met: we were sharing our early photos on a discussion board to collect technical feedbacks or composition points of view, and our respective styles evolved to turn out quite similar - probably due to same influences and a common aesthetics taste. 

RB: At that time the board admins started “in real life” meetings and shootings, and we had the chance to meet in person and become friends. It was 10 years ago, around 2008.

ST: I’ve learned the technical aspects of photography essentially by gathering information on various websites, and testing with a cheap digital camera. I cannot remember a specific website. I think it was more a collection of websites. I only remember the website “luminous landscape” did a pretty good job concerning the best practice to “expose to the right” when I dug that subject. And I’ve moved to shot film later on, once the technic had been mastered in digital actually.

RB: I learned the basics with my brother-in-law, and went further with the photo club in secondary school. My first digital camera also helped me a lot to test things and somehow try to find my way.

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking? How is the language evolving and impacting daily life of people and communities in your opinion?

ST: I am still shooting film for my personal projects, and that is also the case for “SHAN SHUI”. I am absolutely not a “film-integralist” though, and I look very closely at what’s being developed in the digital scene. It’s true, maybe, that film brings a slower “shooting process” that I like, emphasized by larger and less automated cameras to operate vs. compact and assisted cameras, and can possibly end up with noticeable different compositions sometimes. But I don't think the medium changes the “language” that much. I think that the biggest impact essentially comes from the rise of social networks. A need for impacting illustrative pictures and smaller screens display favoring compositions which are more “straight to the point”. But yet again, I think there is room for everything. Maybe the “urge” to be more connected, with faster interconnections and immediate instant sharing can really change the day to day way of communicating.

RB: Also, I think what changes the most is the relationship we have with images. They overflow from everywhere. I sometimes feel like we are slowly getting less sensitive to what an image is.

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

Fast interconnections and instant sharing. How this is affecting the role of a documentary photographer and your own practice?

ST: I personally find it quite hard to stick with the “expected” publication rhythm. I work essentially with series. I almost never shoot in “random day to day” situations. I’m actually not even the kind of photographer that carries a camera with me all the time. So I have virtually little pictures to share per year. But the usual expectations from social networks can range to as much as 3 photos a day! I try to find a balance or compromise between the two. I go with a much slower tempo, trying to dilute my series over time, and combining with “extras” and “leftovers”, to keep a certain rhythm while also using this approach as an opportunity to share the “making of” a project and keep the public interested. But I do not think that it changes my practice of photography - the way I consider my compositions - for now. It does change the way I communicate it to the public.

Rb: copy-paste :)

Could you describe the process of working together on the same project? How this affected your personal methodology

ST: We’ve worked together at all stages of the project. Documenting, preparing, shooting and editing. But we sometimes worked “all together” and some other times sharing out the work.

RB: We worked with two cameras. But we know each other, and we know that our approaches are so similar that we were confident that the images would fit together. We had common efforts in the preparation process, spotting the areas of interest and some possible locations. Then, we either worked apart in order to maximize the covered zones and points of view and debriefing every night, or we worked together for crucial locations where we could not afford to miss the shots. And also when the location was hard to reach and we needed respective support.

The series 'Shan Shui' featured on the catalog of Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019

The series 'Shan Shui' featured on the catalog of Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019

The series 'Shan Shui' featured on the catalog of Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019

The series 'Shan Shui' featured on the catalog of Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019

The series 'Shan Shui' featured on the catalog of Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019

Can you introduce to the series/work 'Shān Shuǐ - of dust, concrete, and water ' that was selected for Urbanautica Institute Awards. What are the basic motivations and assumptions of this project? Why and when?

RB: I’ve been interested in eastern cities for years. My first project was in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. After that, I went to South Korea, focusing on urbanization, and I had started to think about China as a next project.

ST: As far as I’m concerned, I had run into newspapers’ articles about the “South to North water diversion” project taking place in China. It consists of redesigning the water routes in the country in an attempt to balance the water supply with the demand. I think it was in late 2014. But at that time my interest was mainly about curiosity, and not meant at first to be a photo project. 

RB: Sebastien and I know each other for many years, as photographers and as friends. We have a very similar approach to photo aesthetics, framing, colors. We work with similar cameras and film, and we also had the feeling that we could bear each other in situations of tiredness or stress. So we started talking about a collaboration, and it built into a project bit by bit, during the first half of 2015.

ST: During our researches, we learned about the “new silk road” project. And the impact that such a booming development plan has on the mountains around, leading to their flattening. We started assembling the puzzle, and think of it with a more global view. That’s when the “twist” with the “Shan Shui” painting popped and offered the articulation for the project.

RB: Shan Shui is the name of a style of traditional Chinese painting, made with brushes and ink. It literally means “Mountain Water”, and pays tribute to water courses and mountains. It is still a contemporary style and plays a role in Chinese culture. Rivers and mountains are precisely what is challenged by those projects in the central regions of China. And the project SHAN SHUI was born.

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

What difficulties you have faced with this project?

ST: Without a doubt, the most difficult thing from my point of view was to find a way out of the “touristic places”. Because of the potential local suspicion, but also in a very practical way: the no touristic places are much harder to reach for a foreigner, because car location is not possible without a Chinese driving license, and not all taxis accept to bring you there.

RB: We often had to combine bus and hiking. First, a long bus trip up to the final stop to get as close as possible, and then hours of hiking to reach the destination. Some other times we had to find people who accepted to drove us there, even though it can appear quite suspicious to most to drive foreigners out of town. I believe there is a great suspicion that you could be working for an NGO or something. And then the language barrier is yet another issue!

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

Your work raises a strong awareness of environmental issues. It's written on the statement «Despite being known since time began as the “Mother River”, many incidents of river pollution have taken place in this part of the region in the past decades. It is also in these regions that the Chinese government has initiated the flattening of numerous mountains in order to encourage urban development and economic activity». Is this a central topic in your personal explorations as photographers?

ST: As far as I'm concerned, it does occupy a central place in my work, one way or another. But not necessarily as a direct topic. My previous work “Allanngorpoq” about Greenland was not directly related to the environmental issues of global warming, but how the society changes in the country - but both are linked somehow. But, you know, we hear about the idea of “Anthropocene” more and more, and this is clearly at the heart of my thinkings and concerns. What I mean is that I don't think we can dissociate the environment and our actions as humans, and globally that's what interests me in my work.

RB: Initially I started focusing on how human shapes and altered his environment. It may be a central topic of my work, but for this project, it was really interesting to find a way to take a step aside and artificially bring face to face our interpretation of Shan Shui and those landscapes. This approach describes quite well what I am aiming for as a photographer.

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

The booming Chinese urbanizations have attracted many foreign photographers to Asia in the past 20 years. These works have helped to promote an understanding of the global economic transformations thought sometimes highlighting stereotypes. What about your own choices in depicting these landscapes. Which criteria drove your exploration?

ST: China is often pictured through the prism of its massive urbanization and gigantic cities. And of course, there are also major bodies of work about China’s rivers. For this series, we wanted to propose an approach a bit different. Not just focus on the cities or rivers as the main subject, but to provide a view that brings the urbanization process and its nature all together, with its context, its ins and outs.

RB: So we took the risk to move away of the very impressive and gigantic urban shots of megacities and venture to smaller scale cities and even some countryside views. We constructed the series more as narration rather than a collection of “in your face” pics, and that drove our exploration too.

ST: From an aesthetic perspective, we tried to get inspiration from Shan Shui paintings too … as much as possible. These paintings are mostly fictional representations painted on very narrow vertical stripes, so they cannot be actually easily “copied” in photography. But we had the idea to capture some of the moods and produce “painting-like” pictures. We used mostly low contrast films, in combination with low contrast lightning, especially during days with white smoggy skies.

RB: We also tried to provide the largest view we could of the area. Not simply collecting pictures of mountains flattening, but also - even though we have kept the human presence small and distant in our images - capturing the life of people in the neighborhoods along the river for example. Trying to depict how the different aspects fit together: the urbanization process that goes on and the more usual aspects of the city.

ST: Our hope is that the readers will get curious about these regions and their challenges, and bring the questions that are raised to a larger scale. These regions concentrate a lot on current challenges, but these challenges do not just concern China, and they don’t just happen in China. It’s about us all.

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

© Sébastien Tixier & Raphaël Bourelly from the series 'Shan Shui'

Three books that you recommend...

RB: Errance by Raymond Depardon. This book really moved me as a photographer. I think this book instantly gave me the desire to travel the world. Any book from Frédéric Pajack, a very gifted illustrator. I discovered his work about Nietzsche, it really moved me. His graphic novels are just incredible. Yellow River by Zhang Kechun, obviously a great inspiration.

ST: Bike Kill, a photobook by Julie Glasberg. Each copy is half homemade and it smells rubber! L'intranquille, an autobiography by French painter Gerard Garouste. I love everything about this book. It's an autobiography yet it moved me like few other books ever did.
And Yangtse The Long River by Nadav Kander still occupies a very special place in my heart. Probably the photobook that inspired me most.

Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

RB: I’m the father of two young children, and it’s a great experience, but unfortunately, I am at the stage where it's quite hard to find the time to go out. But you could say it’s like an everyday life show… And for sure it's quite inspiring !

ST: I’ve attended theater dramas a lot more than usually do recently. It’s still way too early to tell if it will influence my work and how, but I’ve found this to be a very welcomed fresh air to feed the mind. Wajdi Mouawad’s pieces challenge and amaze me in a very positive way currently.

What are you up to?

RB: I’m at a stage where I need to find back the pleasure of experimenting with things. I’m trying to shoot as much as a can with a large format camera. I want to go back processing at home, but I’m not really sure I’m going to do something with it.

SE: I'm slowing starting what could be the start of a new project. There are many society aspects and civilizational concerns that get my attention these days. I wish I can turn that into a series at some point. Nothing really defined for the moment, I'm essentially collecting ideas, and experimenting with technics. I'm not rushing, I want to let it grow and see where it goes. 

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LINKS
Raphaël Bourelly
Sébastien Tixier
Urbanautica France 
Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019