Since 2015, artist Janie Julien-Fort has been making and installing hundreds of small pinhole cameras around construction sites, acting as makeshift surveillance cameras that scrutinize the progress of work over time. She uses the solargraphy technique: with no mechanism or lens, sunlight passes through a tiny needlehole to leave an imprint on photosensitive paper. Each image requires exposure times of several months. At the end of this long cohabitation with the landscape, the images reveal the randomness of movement, blurred zones and accidents of light. The flickering images evoke the fragility of photography and the passage of time, like the subtle traces left by the path of the sun.
This two-book set offers a poetic and theoretical journey through the artist's approach, the Quebec landscape and the materiality of the photographic image. It includes the artist's book Les paysages éphémères, the fruit of an artistic and literary collaboration between Janie Julien-Fort and author Claire Moeder, and the book Chantiers sous surveillance, presenting the artist's process of micro-interventions in public space, with texts by Christian Roy and Francis O'Shaugnessy.
