JULIEN SUNYE | BLACK HOLES

Black Holes
By Julien Sunye

In 2016 I passed through Verdun, France, to have a look at the battlefields of the First World War. That year, preparations were made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the end of that war.
A few months before, they had just celebrated Freedom Day in The Netherlands, which refers to the liberation from Nazi Germany.
While looking at the bomb craters surrounding the city of Verdun, it struck me that despite all these celebrations, the idea that we live in peace is an illusion. The bombs are falling somewhere else, far away, out of sight, the fighting has shapeshifted into economic forms with the exploitation of people in poorer countries, and the planet is burning up with natural resources becoming ever scarcer and many living species dying out. I was wondering when the bombs would return to Europe.
I decided to make a triptych featuring a nude woman stuck in these landscapes changed by war. As I was looking for interesting landscapes to include in this small project, I came across so many that I ended up spending years traveling to these locations to photograph them. The project features many different locations across seven European countries and resulted in the creation of the book Black Holes, prefaced by Arnon Grunberg and published by Lecturis Publishers.

The title refers to the strong, inescapable pull of the black holes we find in space.
We can’t see them, but if we pay close attention, we can feel their presence as an unsettling tremble in the air, and by the time we truly notice them, they are too close, and it’s too late to prevent a tragedy. The same applies to the vicious cycles of violence and destruction humanity has been trapped in for as long as history books recount.

JULIEN SUNYE

Trapped between a desire to connect and a longing for solitude, that’s where Sunyé’s photography finds its creative origin. His photographs depict the search for ‘le sublime’ in the most fundamental elements of human existence; the connection between the human and its environment.
Marked by the animated movies he used to watch as a child and the 19th-century French literature he studied at Spéos in Paris and Fotoacademie in Amsterdam. His work is profoundly poetic, dreamlike, peaceful, and well-defined, where everything is in perfect balance, and nothing from the outside can penetrate.
With the help of his camera, Sunyé uses light as a replacement for ‘touch’ and ‘love’ and creates with each photograph an image of a world that could have been, if…
Sunyé’s work has been exhibited worldwide and received respectable recognition at the Expo in Paris, Arles, and Leiden. He has also been awarded international awards and recognition from the Spider Awards, IPA, FAPA, and ND, among others.

The “Black Holes” series was awarded by
Lecturis and published in a book available for purchase online at:
lecturis.nl/en/product/black-holes/

See the full article published in Lens Magazine Issue #100