Denis Darzacq – Shop ’til you drop

December 11, 2009 by Oliver Geffken. Average Reading Time: about a minute.

Denis Darzacq takes haunting pictures of free-falling figures in french hypermarkets. What does it all mean? A young man dressed in white floats limply in the wrapping paper department of a supermarket. A young woman in a brown hoodie shirt is flung
as if by a punch or by an explosion, from a supermarket flower stall. A young man in a green shirt and trainers walks on air past shelves loaded with light-shades and plastic dustbins.

denis-darzacq-shop-til-you-drop

None of these images has been “Photoshopped” or tampered with. They are surreal
photographs of real moments – or real 1,000ths of a moment. Young, amateur dancers and sports men and women in Rouen, in Normandy, are offering their bodies and their talent to the disturbing, witty and compelling lens of the French photographer
Denis Darzacq.

“You could say that this is a meditation on being and having,” says Darzacq. “These
photographs were taken in aggressive, garish hypermarkets, with names like Attac and King Kong. I was interested in showing bodies of young people, as if imprisoned in the aisles of consumer goods. I asked them to perform the actions that they might perform in their sporting activities or dances. At the peak of the action, I asked them to relax all their muscles at once to give the impression that they were floating or flying through the air.”

Text: John Lichfield, via The Independent – Art Features.

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