PANORAMIQUE
(Paris, Buffalo, Limoges, Genesee Country Village, Niagara Falls, Poitiers, Rochester...)
                                                 1999-present

Le Flâneur de la Place de la Bastille, Paris                                                                            ©   Bruno Chalifour



After trying several formats that may have been just adequate but not what I wanted for my MFA thesis, I finally settled for a Fuji 617. The statistics were there. I had never had such a ratio of successful images per roll.

I started to document the downtowns of cities in Upstate New York (our Bermuda triangle, as I call it: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse). Then extended the project to their counterpoints: urban sprawl that was emptying them, sucking their vital energy and blood. I started to read "The Arcade Project" by Walter Benjamin where he describes the Paris passages and arcades that were innovatively built out of glass and steel in the first decades of the 19th century. I consider them the ancestor of our malls. So I went to Paris and photographed what had become of them. I also photograph Paris and the French countryside.

The photograph above is the first panoramic image I have ever taken in France, straight out of the plane, walking out of La Bastille subway station on a cold and gray winter morning of 2000.

90% of these images are black and white. They exist in print formats that reach 40" and beyond in width.