Border stories (artist statement)

"The common factor linking all the locations depicted in these photographic stories is that they were or still are home to border crossings.

This roaming, cultivated by the dialogue between the observer and the photographer, is to be viewed and understood as an attempt to associate borders - government-imposed objects - with individual destinies, with the destinies of those who have crossed these borders, been stopped by them, even died at them, like Walter Benjamin.

The words of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Peter Handke and several other writers determined the choice of the locations that I captured through my lens.

The first steps of this project were taken during a time when the gradual dismantling of national borders seemed achievable. The last twenty years, however, have once again given rise to a spectacle of at times bloody conflicts within Europe itself. Which explains why some of the photographs contain traces of these events almost without my intention.

These border locations - rather mundane like any other location - feature landscapes and people, and yet there is something mysterious and woefully relevant about them. Georges Perec called them places of disappearance.

This photographic series was created between 1989 and 2009."

Yvon Lambert, translation: Claire Weyland