Bertrand Carrière, Sound Mirrors, 2019
"Bertrand Carrière is a photographer but he could just as well have been a historian and/or sociologist. For the last 40 years, his work has been tracking our footsteps and what defines us as a society.
His most recent body of work, Sound Mirrors, born from a 6-month residency in London, is a good example. He identified a dozen of these "pre-digital" radars that tracked the sound of enemy aircrafts on British shores during the First World War and until the beginning of the Second."
- François Babineau, Galerie Simon Blais
"Long walks through the fields, along the cliffs of England, in Kent and in Yorkshire, looking for the remaning sound mirrors, those vestiges of a bygone era, between 1916 and 1940. Early in the nineteenth century, during the First World War, the British military invented a listening device as an early warning system. The sound mirror where made to listen to the sky, to alert the cities of incoming bombing aircraft. These big ears, still standing are something between military apparatus, scientific objects and brutalist sculptures. Only a few of these structures remain. Butm, in these times of Brexit they take on an ironic meaning, as the UK has turned a deaf ear towards Europe. These pictures where made between July and October 2019, during my residency at the CALQ Québec Studio in London."
- Bertrand Carrière
