Rarity 13.6/100 · Collector 0/100 · Deal 33.47/100 · Listings: 4 · Avg price: $82.79 · Min price: $59.62

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Cyrus Cornut’s Chongqing: Sur les quatre rives du temps qui passe examines a Chinese metropolis being remade at extraordinary speed. Rather than reducing Chongqing to monumental skylines, Cornut attends to the unstable relationship between terrain, construction and habitation. Natural mist mingles with the haze associated with rapid development, softening the city’s outlines while making its density and scale newly perceptible.

Working with a 4 × 5 camera, Cornut brings deliberation to a subject commonly represented through spectacle. His training as an architect informs a precise awareness of structures, distances and the ways bodies occupy space. The photographs are composed as urban tableaux, using a restrained chromatic palette to hold infrastructure, vegetation and human activity within the same frame. Their contemplative tempo does not neutralize the force of urban expansion; it allows its contradictions to remain visible.

People provide the series with its essential measure. Cornut observes former farmers cultivating vegetables in overlooked plots, as well as residents fishing or bathing in the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. Such gestures are neither presented as simple nostalgia nor made to carry an imposed political conclusion. Instead, they register forms of continuity and adaptation within a landscape suspended between older practices and accelerated modernization. Resilience and melancholy coexist without resolving one another.

Published by Atelier EXB in 2021 as a French-English hardcover, the book offers collectors a concentrated study of contemporary urban photography shaped by the discipline of large-format observation. Its significance lies in the conjunction of architectural intelligence and social attention: Chongqing appears not merely as a symbol of growth, but as a lived environment whose scale is continually interrupted—and clarified—by individual acts.