Maciej Czepiel

What’s in Front of Us - 2020

Enquête Photographique Valaisanne 2020 - EQ2

We look at the world throughout the machines that are in our pockets thinking we’ll connect with one-another, but we miss out on the real connection to the world, and it’s in front of us. New technologies invade our thots, and especially cellphones, that are omnipresent in our lives. I can’t imagine a situation where we wouldn’t use our cellphone. Everybody owns one and constantly takes pictures with it. In this work I take the position of the population but also the photographer’s. I want to talk about how we act towards what we have in front of us. Similarly to the “Wanderer contemplating a sea of fog” from Caspar David Friedrich, in this work I contemplate my mind, tormented by human abnegation. We’ve forgotten what’s important in our lives, we are run by the machines that are in our pockets. In this work I use the landscape of Valais as a metaphor to talk about what’s important in our lives and that we miss out on.

At first I wanted to use the population from Valais to talk about this subject, but I quickly realized that I too, am part of this population and the critic would have even more impact if I put myself in these landscapes and critic my own actions towards what’s happening with new technologies.

Finally, my photographies represent the “cryptogramme” of the mountain that we all know, the Matterhorn ( Cervin ). A tripod becomes a mountain, as well as to hands put together, with humanity’s modern day “Holy Grail” ( a smartphone ). An evocation of a tripod built with pieces of wood that becomes a mountain… On the other side there’s me looking for signal in front of this spectacle of nature. I critic these gestures we all do but I also critic the photographer that creates this project, me. I am engulfed in this gorgeous landscape and yet I don’t look at it with my own eyes but throughout my camera.

In this whole work I tried to talk about the mountain, the landscape. I try all along to re-create this mountain that we all know, the Matterhorn, this triangular shape, on which the beauty of the world is set, like on a tripod.

“At school, at the very outset, when the master was teaching us how to hold a pencil and to amuse us, would say, “now, draw a house, a tree, a flower, a mountain”, all of us without knowing or intending it, would draw matterhorn”. - Gaston Rebuffat

Exhibition What’s In Front of Us, EQ2 - VFG Nwfp 2022 - “Coup de Coeur” - IPFO, Haus der Fotografie, Olten, Switzerland, September

Exhibition Enquête Photographique Valaisanne 2020, EQ2 - Ferme Asile - Sion, Switzerland, October 2021