Seoul, Series "Monuments"

Stephane Couturier relishes the notion of exploring an urban city with a strong history and documenting the layers of change that he finds in that city. An elusive sense of scale and ambiguous awareness of abstraction run throughout all his images of construction sites in Paris, Dresden, and Berlin. Here he photographs Seoul, Korea, where the expanding city is encroaching on the rural countryside. The large scale of the photographs makes the "wall" of the new apartment buildings more obvious. It is also part of a style of monumental photographs that has been part of the fascination with the work of the German photographers from Dusseldorf: Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff.