Some of the photographs of Stéphane Couturier resemble the urban photography I have already featured – by Andreas Gursky and Michael Wolf – the head-on squared up building shots, but the others shown here are far more individual. Couturiers photographs, whether of construction sites in Berlin, demolished buildings in Havana, or an automobile assembly plant in Valenciennes, are all about transformation, a subject he explores with a strong sense of design and composition and a brilliant sense of colour. Couturier began his career as an art photographer in his native Paris in the early 1990s and has since made significant bodies of work in Dresden, Berlin, Seoul, Moscow, Beijing, and most recently Havana. His images are characterized by a vast array of visual information and a conception that separates him from his contemporary German counterparts. He searches for visually complex sites exhibiting dynamic vertical and horizontal lines, elegant curves, and brilliant effects of light and indigenous colour. Stéphane Couturier was born in Neuilly sur Seine, France, in 1957. His photographs have been featured at many international venues such as the Moscow Biennial, the ICP Triennial, Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg and the Museum of Photography, Charleroi, Belgium. He is also in most major American museums and collections. The Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yale Art Gallery, Nelson-Atkins Museum, The National Gallery of Art and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, as well as the LaSalle National Bank corporate collection. In 2004, the Bibliotheque National in Paris featured a major retrospective of his career to date.
