Philippe Chancel: Desert Spirit

by Quentin Bajac, Philippe Chancel (Photographer)

Photographer Philippe Chancel (born 1959) has mined the terrain between art, documentary and journalism for over 20 years. Between 2007 and 2009, Chancel made several visits to the United Arab Emirates, and found a country overwhelming in its architectural giganticism and astounding in its determination to domesticate a hostile environment. The resultant feeling of artifice is the desert grows green, seawater is desalinated and new islands rise out of the sea. Moving from one air-conditioned space to another, from apartment to limousine, from limousine to shopping mall, from shopping mall to theme park, Chancel found irresistible pictures to take at every turn. Under his gaze, the United Arab Emirates is laid bare as the realization of the consumer society ideal, in which humans exist in a wholly manmade domain. With his characteristic frontal, distanced framing, devoid of judgment and emotion, Chancel portrays a country that is at once baffling and fascinating.

114 pages, Hardcover

First published August 30, 2010

About the author

Quentin Bajac is a French museum curator and art historian specialising in the history of photography. He is the director of the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Bajac has held positions at the Musée d'Orsay (1995–2003), Centre Georges Pompidou (2003–2010), Musée National d'Art Moderne and École du Louvre (2010–2013) and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (2013–2018).
He has published a number of works on photography, most notably the three-volume series—La photographie—on the history of photography (2000–2010), which belongs to the collection Découvertes Gallimard, as well as Parr by Parr: Discussions with a Promiscuous Photographer (2011), Stephen Shore: Solving Pictures (2017), Being Modern: MoMA in Paris (co-author with Olivier Michelon, 2017).
In 2013 Bajac was made a Chevalier (knight) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.