Sebastien ReuzéIndian Springs

“Artist’s book presenting photographs of the American air base of Indian Springs in Nevada, a piloting zone for drones engaged in the Middle East. The retouching of the photographs disturbs the apparent realism of the images and tends towards a fictional and anxiety-provoking narrative close to that of J. G. Ballard.
If, at the beginning, Sébastien Reuzé was looking for the wonder of a single glance, by making a fictional dimension spring from a fact found in front of him, with Indian Springs he is in the middle of fiction. Authorised to photograph on a US Air Force base where soldiers are flying drones in Afghanistan or Syria, for example, the artist was obliged to stage the images featuring pilots. So with the documentary-like outdoor photographs, but with the colours altered by X-rays as they leave the country rather than the base, the artist has not only fictionalised the indoor shots, but has also placed a few objects in his installation, such as a soldier’s cap adorned with salt crystals, to take us to areas well known to the SF writer J. G. Ballard.”