«When one speaks of Tangier, some words often come up : fiction, myth, theater, staging, operetta... And some names are often mentioned : ‘writers', ‘artists', ‘actors' or VIP names that are used to designate protectors of that place (decadent protectors for most of them, as is the city) : Paul Bowles, Claudio Bravo, the Rolling Stones, William Burroughs, Mohamed Choukri, Barbara Hutton etc. In Tanger fait son cinéma, Patricia Tomé writes :
“... And there were those who decided to stay here, standing in front of the four cardinal points, neither exiled, nor emigrants, just wandering travellers without return ticket, transiting hickers, nomadic artists whom by seeking to witness this place's exoticism and to reflect their lifestyle, had built their own city of legends, their own myth and whom had made a permanent act on a movie set of their own existence. Tangier had become the screen of their reality (...). They were evolving in a scenario between reality and fiction. The city of Straits was giving them a unique stage, a magnificent open-air theater".
That "scenario between reality and fiction", that "movie set" is what I intended to put into images through that work which I've been absorbed in for over three years. As in my last works on Asmara and Casablanca, my photographic approach of the urban landscape departs from simple documentation in order to draw an imaginary, almost dreamlike portrait of the city.» — Marco Barbon
Marco Barbon
Born in Rome in 1972, Marco Barbon lives in France since 2001. After a PHD in Aesthetics of Photography at the EHESS in Paris, he took his first steps in the world of photography by working for five years in the staff of the Magnum Photos agency where he had the opportunity to collaborate, among others, with photographers like Harry Gruyaert, Bruce Davidson and Josef Koudelka. Since 2005 he has devoted himself to a personal photographic research which invests the photographic image as a border zone between reality and imaginary, document and fiction. The nature of photography as a trace as well as its ability to evoke the hors-champ and to represent the absence constitutes in particular the framework of his latest works.
Author of the books Asmara Dream (Postcart, 2009; reissued in 2016), Cronotopie (Postcart, 2010), Casablanca (Postcart, 2011), Les pas perdus (Poursuite, 2014), Asmara (Be-Pôles, 2014), El Bahr (Filigranes, 2016) and The Interzone (Postcart, 2017), his photographs have been published in the French and international press. His works, regularly exhibited in France and abroad, are part of several public and private collections.
Marco Barbon's work is represented by the Clémentine de la Feronnière gallery (Paris) and by the Galerie 127 (Marrakech).
Marco Barbon
Marco Barbon
Marco Barbon
Luca Campigotto
AA.VV.
Flore
George Georgiou
Marco Rigamonti
Franco Zecchin
