Sabine Delcour lives and works in Bordeaux. She has been documenting urban transformation processes since her first commission, which focused on the arrival of the tram in Seine-Saint-Denis (near Paris). Regularly commissioned by La Fabrique de Bordeaux Métropole and the Bordeaux Métropole Planning Department (Direction de l'Aménagement), she keeps track of areas undergoing radical change: development projects, construction sites and transitions between city and nature. For the exhibition's opening in March 2025, a photograph from The Dark Side of the Sun, a series of 12 diptychs created under a carte blanche from La Fab, was installed in an archway in the main gallery. Under a harsh winter night sky, a “junkspace’”– to use Rem Koolhaas's term – unfolded, made up of garish signs, empty car parks and artificial lights captured in Mérignac-Soleil, a commercial area covering nearly 69 hectares. “My work begins at the moment when darkness obscures part of our vision and limits the possibilities of an image” explains Sabine Delcour. Each wide shot in the series is paired with a sample photographed using a long focal length. Photography thus becomes a ”dual tool, for understanding the world as well as for losing one's bearings, scales and distances” as evoked by the title of the series, which reverses the ”solar” attraction of commerce to reveal its hidden facade at night.
In July 2025, it was the turn of L'observatoire des entrées de la métropole bordelaise (The Bordeaux Metropolitan Area Entrance Observatory), carte blanche for Bordeaux Métropole, to take its place in the grand arc en rêve gallery. The series focuses on the elements that punctuate the arrival in the city: airport, transport networks, collective housing, car parks and commercial areas, etc. By developing this work on urban entrances – the last spaces still available for construction and in the midst of transition – over a full year (2023-2024), Sabine Delcour captures the changing suburbs. She deliberately places herself at a distance from the landscapes she observes, which erases the depth of her images by placing all the planes at the same distance, like a backdrop or a collage. The order in which the photographs appear has been carefully chosen, playing on references and confrontations that are sometimes ironic or humorous, but always meaningful. A narrative emerges. In the foreground, in front of a budget hotel, is a caravan of travelers. Under the Feu Vert sign, there are stationary cars. An empty swimming pool. Improbably shaped architectures constructed in the 1970s and 1980s, and their haphazard extensions. Building facades and cruise ships merge together. A recent collective housing projects take on Maisons du monde. These hyper-places, or non-places, depending on who you ask, categorize a France considered by some to be “moche” (ugly), but still inhabited, even by tourists and their suitcases, lost in a deserted car park.
In addition to the photographic treatment of these two cartes blanches, the two subjects resonate with each other, primarily through the territory they cover. “It’s about looking at the other side of cities and trying to understand what peripheral areas have in common” explains Sabine Delcour. The lengthy duration of these projects also connects them, echoing that of developers and reinforcing the importance of landscape photography. For Sabine Delcour, “time is fundamental to understanding spaces and their uses”. A look at the portfolio we are publishing would not contradict this.