Origin of the project

The windows of the shops whose doors are closed, those that are sometimes walled up with concrete blocks, are part of our everyday landscape.

In France, half of the villages no longer have any local shops. In 1910, there were more than 500,000 coffee shopsin the country. Some 35,000 remain today. Accusing the hegemonic expansion of mass distribution, the number of butcher shops has been divided by 6 in 30 years.

Since 2008, we have travelled around the Lyon and Saint-Étienne urban regions and their surroundings, reflecting the metamorphoses of the landscape through photography.

As we wandered, we were early sensitive to the presence of many abandoned shops on our roads. Initially immortalizing the most original, decayed or incongruous, we have collected in ten years nearly a thousand shops!

This work has given birth to the series we are presenting to you today: Silence. A selection of 250 images documenting an eclectic mix of activities (whether commercial, craft or service), eras and aesthetic singularities.

The book

Since the creation of our team, most of our photographic work has been published on the archive site lyon2024.com, sometimes accompanied by exhibitions or installations. You can discover the Silence series right now at this address: www.lyon2024.com/?SILENCE

Now we' d like to trade pixels for ink and paper! Silence, which is organised for the edition of a large artbook, will present itself over the pages as a journey through roads and alleys in peripheral, rural or post-industrial territories. A visual odyssey into the ghostly universe.

The book can only be ordered on the occasion of this campaign, copies will then be available in some bookstores in the Lyon region.

Regarding technical specifications: Silence will consist of 264 colour pages, printed in high digital resolution on 100% recycled fibre paper (very slightly speckled) in an horizontal format of 14.8 x 21 cm. This issue will be limited to 250 copies.

The rewards

This call is essentially dedicated to the pre-sales of the book, but we also offer different rewards according to the level of participation:

A set of postcards containing four emblematic photographs of the series
An A4 print on laid paper reproducing the "Silence" cover photograph
An A3 art print, numbered at 15 copies and signed, that you can choose from different pictures in the series!

Silence, 250 abandoned shops