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Cyrus Cornut has photographed with a 4x5 chamber the Chinese city of Chongqing, undergoing one of the world’s highest demographic and economic growth rates with its population of 34 million. Also known as the “capital of fog” due to its natural mist and to the endemic pollution that has accompanied its rapid development. Working with a chamber, the photographer, architect by training, takes a contemplative look at the city attentive to the signs of the urban landscape explosion in Asia.

“He also lingered on the residents, who provide the human scale, and particularly on former farmers who are resisting by appropriating the tiniest cracks to cultivate their vegetables, who continue to fish or swim in the waters of the Yangzi or its tributary the Jialing, as though nothing were amiss. His images perfectly describe the ambiguities of the modern world and the glut of limitless economic development. ”, as Sylvie Hugues underlines in her essay, without imposing a particular message or politic view. These urban photographs, with a subtle chromatic palette, bring out both a silent resilience as well as a melancholy from this state of in-between worlds.

Cyrus Cornut, Paris.
Photographer, Architect of training, his work is oriented first of all on the city, its plastic, its evolutions, its traces, its voids, and on the human behaviors that it induces.
In 2006, his first work on Chinese cities was exhibited at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles under the artistic direction of Raymond Depardon. He was a member of the Picturetank cooperative agency which he joined in 2007, until its closure in 2017. In 2010, with the France 14 group, he exhibited "travelling to the outskirts", work on the landscapes of mass housing in Île of France.
From2011 his research also focuses on the place of plants in the urban landscape, but also to rural landscapes. Thus born "Alberstein's trip"collaborative work that attempts the synthesis between different questions about the human, its natural environment, planned or relational and the time frame in which it evolves.
He is now developing a 4x5 medium format work that allows him to take a slow look at urban evolutions, in Asia, as in France, as well as a more plastician body of work mixing drawing, engraving and photography.