Clément ParadisLa Fin de l'Abondance

We are at the end of the year 2022 and an expression is on everyone's lips: "the end of abundance". But abundance of what? Of whom? This sentence without real content has become a climate today. Absurd, anxiety-provoking, exhilarating for some. For Clément Paradis, abundance is that of images - not the "supermarket of images" to which he never goes, but rather his own images, for he likes photographs when they are produced and consumed in sets rather than as delicate appetizers. There is indeed nothing delicate about this "France, liquidated territory" that he has been surveying since the end of the "transits" in 2020. It was therefore necessary to make a big book to recapture what, in his photographic archives, touched on the abundance that was supposed to end.

After his books Sound of Midnight in 2014 and 春爛漫 Haru Ranman in 2015, the work leading up to La Fin de l'abondance was both very long and very short. Very long because the volume brings together some fifteen years of photographs in 17 incisive 48-page chapters. Very short, because the editing had to have the same spontaneity as the emergence of this hollow sentence, "it's the end of abundance". Scissors in hand for two sleepless weeks, he edited the 816 pages of the book to keep it in constant motion.