Benoit Aquin
in Maria

EXHIBIT

L’agriculture au Québec : un photo-roman d’anticipation
(Québec’s agriculture: an anticipation photo-novel)

Vieux-Quai Park (Auberge Mowatt) | 550 Boulevard Perron | Maria

Benoit Aquin, Montréal, Québec | benoit-aquin.com

With a particular fondness for subjects connected with social or economic issues, for questions that represent real challenges for humanity, Benoit Aquin endeavors, through his photography, to take a fresh look, or at least an honest one, at the relationship of humanity and its environment.

Climate-related disasters catch his attention, as shown in his series Tsunami (2004), carried out in Indonesia, and Haiti (2010-2011). Ecological changes also feature in his concerns: climate warming in Québec’s Far North (2005) or the 2007 food crisis in Egypt. Benoit Aquin won the Prix Pictet in 2008 for pictures from his series The Chinese Dust Bowl (2006-2007).

EXHIBIT AT rencontres

L’agriculture au Québec : un photo-roman d’anticipation
(Québec’s agriculture: an anticipation photo-novel)

The twelve pictures presented at Rencontres in the summer of 2016 are the fruit of an artist’s residency by Benoit Aquin in different Baie-des-Chaleurs farms or agricultural cooperatives in 2015. They are part of his body of work on agriculture in Québec.

“Interested as I am in the reality of the world of agriculture, I visited farms close to Montreal with the idea of photographing them. Not only did I find a subject that reflects the environmental concerns that have guided my work for a good many years, but it seemed to me that these farms constituted the proper framework in which to make my photographic practice harder-hitting.

“In the Québec context, addressing the issue of agriculture means taking an interest in a reality that seems to be a matter of less and less concern to citizens, even though their survival will depend on economic choices we make right now regarding the management of our agricultural regions. At a time when the free-trade model is bringing about the closure of two farms a day in Québec and when the intensification of single-crop farming threatens simultaneously the fertility of our richest land and the diversity of ecosystems on which the survival of our countryside depends, I’m convinced that the strength of photography makes this medium a powerful tool for raising awareness of these issues.

“After turning my attention to foreign lands, I feel a deep need to work on my own culture. In that light I exaggerated the pictorial quality of my photography through use of a direct flash that heightens the intensity of the photographic act and that produces images possessing a high degree of abstraction, despite their being raw descriptions of the tangible world.”

Benoit Aquin