In his award-winning work, Douglas Mandry - a graduate from Lausanne's ECAL University of Design and Art School - examines the aspects unique to photography as a mechanical recording of reality in order to question the relationship with memory, technology and nature in the context of a world changed by humankind’s presence. Experimenting with both traditional photographic techniques and pioneering new processes, he uses the medium as a raw material, stretches it, reworks it to go beyond the qualities of the original photograph. By manipulating his photographs in this way and combining them with non-photographic elements, he creates a new typology of objects that rests somewhere between two- and three-dimensionality.
Shooting over several days in various seminal Swiss locations, the artist sought to express the dichotomy of the ways in which nature and its representation can be interpreted. Indeed, the artist's own experience of the natural landscape in which he shot is then transformed as he executes a variety of artificial processes on the resulting photographs.
