Restez à la maison; allez marcher

Hardy-Vallee talks about artist Pierre Blache. His photographs do not capture images of urban movement: produced by walking through cities, they constitute, rather, the city's trajectory, its possibilities for motion. Blache constructs a cosmos--his own city. His collisions are internal, like the diffuse anxiety that people feel in nocturnal views, most of them taken from a low angle. His approach is spiritual, seeking to show both things as they are and the secret drama beyond their presence. In cities that he does not name--some of them in Asia--Blache looks for spaces that he can inhabit temporarily, where complex spatial configurations--intersections of planes, zones of tones, and multiple lines of convergence--are subjectively resolved.